A large literature links corruption to reduced investment in health infrastructure, inefficiencies and distortions in health systems, and poor health outcomes. The literature thus tells us that “corruption kills” but a gap exists in terms of our understanding of the effect of corruption on health inequality. Drawing on public choice theory, we argue that corruption drives health inequality through several pathways, including skewing healthcare budgets away from essential primary care, raising access costs through bribery and bureaucratic inefficiency, and eroding public trust in health institutions. Using country-level panel data on inequality in the length of life from Jorda et al. (Sci Data 11(1):650, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03426-6) and the V-DEM indicator of political corruption, we show that an increase in corruption leads to an increase in health inequality within a country. All components of the overall V-DEM political corruption index are harmful in terms of generating health inequality when entered in the model individually, with corruption in the legal and public sectors emerging as significant when all are included. Our finding that corruption leads to increased health inequality is robust to using GMM methods to allow for endogeneity. Health inequality for men and women is increased by corruption.