 While unequal access to health care certainly contributes to health inequalities, epidemiologists argue that the principal causes of these inequalities lie outside of the health care system. These inequalities are largely due to the “social determinants of health”, which we will understand as the socially controllable factors outside the traditional health care system that are independent partial causes of an individual’s health status. Candidate examples of the social determinants of health include income, education, occupational rank, racism, and social class (for a brief corrective against the natural tendency to reserve a privileged position for health care here, see Marmot 2005).