He was comparing "advanced market economies" or something like that.

You're right, he was only looking at "rich" countries. That's why I find his presentation strange. If you want to understand how digital music downloads affect CD sales, you can safely ignore subsistence farmers who don't use electricity. But if you want to understand the relationship between income and health, why exclude countries with low income? That's half of the story.

He says people who live in rich countries have good health on average, while ignoring people who live in poor countries. But when he looks within one country, he doesn't ignore the poor, and seems surprised to find that the rich in that country do better.

In his words:

This shows you life expectancy against gross national income -- how rich countries are on average. And you see the countries on the right, like Norway and the USA, are twice as rich as Israel, Greece, Portugal on the left. And it makes no difference to their life expectancy at all. There's no suggestion of a relationship there.

In my words: If you look at only rich countries, you find that they all have good average health.

In his words:

But if we look within our societies, there are extraordinary social gradients in health running right across society. This, again, is life expectancy. These are small areas of England and Wales -- the poorest on the right, the richest on the left. A lot of difference between the poor and the rest of us. Even the people just below the top have less good health than the people at the top.

In my words: If you look at all the people in England and Wales, you find that the rich ones have the best health, and the poor have worse health.

It's not a surprise to find that low income is associated with lower health standards. If we want to improve health, we should fight poverty.

"Inequality" gets the blame, and I don't understand this. If plants in the garden are thriving, and the plants in the closet are wilting, do we say "unequal access to sunlight" is the problem?

Do the wealthy people "take away" the health of the poor people? Do they take away money from the poor people? I never get clear answers to these questions.