Direct and indirect standardization procedures aim at comparing differences in health or in health care expenditures between subgroups of the population after controlling for observable morbidity differences. There is a close analogy between this problem and the issue of risk adjustment in...

Inequalities in health and health care are caused by different factors. Measuring "unfair" inequalities implies that a distinction is introduced between causal variables leading to ethically legitimate inequalities and causal variables leading to ethically illegitimate inequalities. An example...