Hewitt's interview with the Today programme suggests New Labour is strongly committed to reducing health inequalities.
She said it was "very important" to ban smoking in all pubs, rather than merely those that serve food, because pubs that didn't serve food are disproportionately in poor areas, so allowing smoking in these would widen health inequalities.
This raises the question: if a desire to reduce health inequality is so important as to justify a blanket ban on smoking, what other policies would such health egalitarianism justify?
Greater social equality, that's what. There's good evidence that social inequalities - not just income inequalities - cause health inequalities.
1. The Whitehall studies (pdf) into health in civil servants:
The more senior you are in the employment hierarchy, the longer you might expect to live compared to people in lower employment grades...The social gradient was observed for a range of different diseases: heart disease, some cancers, chronic lung disease, gastrointestinal disease, depression, suicide, sickness absence, back pain and general feelings of ill-health...inequalities in health cannot be divorced from inequalities in society.
2. This paper shows that men aged over 50 were 1.54 times more likely to die in 1995-2001 if they were in social class V in 1971 than if they were in social class I in that year. This inequality applied even to those who escaped their class:
Those who improved their social class between 1971 and 1991 reduced their risk of death somewhat relative to their class of origin but retained a higher risk than others in the class of destination.
3. Actors and actresses who win Oscars live longer than those who are merely nominated (though, oddly, the opposite is true of screenwriters (pdf)).
These three facts all imply that health inequalities arise from status inequality, not merely from the fact that the poor die early: lower-ranking civil servants, Oscar-nominated actors and upwardly mobile people, mostly, have good incomes.
Richard Wilkinson's contribution to this book spells out the link. Lower social status - independently of income - is associated with anxiety, insecurity and stress, all of which contribute to illness and death. Improving health, he says, requires a cut in status inequality - for example, by increasing workplace democracy.
But of course, there's little sign that former management consultant Hewitt wanting to scrap managerialist privileges.
To New Labour, health egalitarianism is a strong enough principle to justify restricting freedom, but not strong enough to justify seriously attacking inequality.
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