Response to Invited Commentary Basu and Siddiqi Respond to “Context, Behaviors, and Hypertension Inequalities”

We thank Dr. Hicken for her commentary (1) on our article regarding disparities in the distributions of blood pressure across racial/ethnic groups in the United States (2). She cor-rectly places our results, which largely show that proximate risk factors are inadequate to explain disparities, in the con-text of a larger body of literature that suggests that broader social determinants of health must be addressed for such dis-parities to be reduced. Indeed, we have written extensively about social welfare policies, political inequalities, and broader socioeconomic power disparities as the ultimate drivers of poor health and of health inequalities (3, 4). Although we agree with Dr. Hicken that multilevel analyses, including analyses of social and political determinants of health, are therefore more useful for modifying disparities, our aim in our article was primarily methodological. Our goal was to il