The Impact of Funding Inpatient Treatments for COVID-19 on Health Equity in the United States: A Distributional Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

•An equity-informative distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA) examined differences in baseline health, treatment effects, and opportunity costs within the general population based on neighborhood-level social vulnerability and race and ethnicity, finding that funding of COVID-19 treatments increased overall population health and reduced inequality, with larger health gains in more socially vulnerable patients.•Key next steps for expanded DCEA use include (1) addressing critical data gaps in the baseline social distribution of health and the level of health inequality aversion in the United States and (2) determining how to best integrate the results from equity-informative cost-effectiveness analysis (like DCEAs) into current healthcare decision making.