High income individuals are healthier and live longer than those at the bottom of the income distribution. Recent research reveals a similar connection between a family’s income and the health of its children. But does low household income cause poor child health outcomes, or are low income and poor child health both caused by some other factor? Is redistributing income to poor families an effective way to improve children’s health?

With the shrinking of the American welfare state, emergency departments in public hospitals have surfaced as sites where the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally ill come for care. Yet county hospitals are unprepared to deal with the swelling numbers of uninsured patients they see, and medical schools have largely failed to address the importance of class and culture in their clinical training programs.