The UCLA Department of Family Medicine, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has launched the Network for Multicultural Research on Health and Healthcare, a group that will study health care disparities affecting minorities with chronic diseases.

In the public health field, there is an ongoing debate as to whether improvement in the overall health of the population is linked to increases or decreases in social inequities in health, that is, the inequities between higher-income and lower-income groups or people of different race/ethnicities.