Sociological research on racial disparities in health has many important lessons for policies that seek to address social inequities in health. First, there are implications for how data on social inequalities in health are reported. For over 100 years, the U.S. public health system has routinely reported national health data by race. Instructively, although SES differences in health are typically larger than racial ones, health status differences by SES are seldom reported and only very rarely are data on health status presented by race and SES simultaneously. Moreover, striking differences are also evident by sex. Given the patterns of social inequalities and the need to raise awareness of the public and policy makers of the magnitude of these inequities and their social determinants, we strongly urge that health data should be routinely collected, analyzed, and presented simultaneously by race, SES and gender. This will highlight the fundamental contribution of SES to the health of the nation and to racial disparities in health. Failure to routinely present racial data by stratifying them by SES within racial groups can obscure the social
