A Times column headlined "What Sweden Can Tell Us About ObamaCare" reports:
The United States spends more than $8,000 a person per year on health care, well more than twice what Sweden spends. Yet health outcomes are far better in Sweden along virtually every dimension. Its infant mortality rate, for example, was recently less than half that of the United States. And males aged 15 to 60 are almost twice as likely to die in any given year in the United States than in Sweden.
In fairness, those differences result partly from lifestyle. In Sweden, workers are more likely to commute by bicycle than by car, for example, and obesity is far less common. Absolute poverty and income inequality — both associated with adverse health outcomes — are also lower.
This claim that income inequality is "associated" with adverse health outcomes is a weaker claim than that it causes adverse health outcomes, but even so it's worth treating with some skepticism. A 2004 article in Epidemiologic Reviews by S.V. Subramanian and Ichiro Kawachi of the Harvard School of Public Health found "the published evidence so far is by no means conclusive about the relation between income distribution and population health." It also reported, "Some evidence suggests that affluent individuals experience health benefits when they live in an area with high inequality" (emphasis added).