Inequality: The more extreme, the worse the health outcomes - for everyone.

[Hannah Bell]

Poverty is more complex than simply a lack of money. According to Diez Roux et al., the most affluent group of black neighborhoods (containing approximately a third of the black study subjects) had about the same median household income as the worst-off group of white neighborhoods. The worst-off-whites had a higher incidence of coronary events than the best-off blacks.

Yet for both blacks and whites, there was a social gradient in the incidence of coronary events: the worse off the neighborhood, the higher the incidence.
Thus, inequalities in health are not confined to poor health among the most deprived.

Studies by my colleagues and me of British civil servants, known as the Whitehall studies,8,9 demonstrated that among white-collar workers, none of whom were poor by any usual standard, mortality and morbidity followed a social gradient -with higher rates as the social hierarchy was descended. The lower the grade of employment, the higher the mortality from coronary heart disease, from all causes, and from most other major causes of death.

http://www.mindfully.org/Health/Inequalities-In-Health-Marmot.htm