health expectancy

[cellio]

I saw a news story today about how US life expectancy is at an all-time high. The article doesn't give enough data to be really useful (it's just the popular press, after all), but I found on reading it that I'm not really interested in life-expectancy figures any more. I'm much more interested in the much-harder-to-compute health expectancy.

In other words, at what age do the statistics say the average person will be last able to live independently with a functioning mind and body? (Yes, of course I recognize that this is hard to characterize precisely.) I don't care if life expectancy goes up to 120 if the last 20 years of it are spent lying in a bed no longer able to recognize anyone. That's where we face our challenges today. Keeping people alive is easy; keeping lives worth living all the way to the end is harder.

Comments

[aliza250.livejournal.com]

Also, presenting life expectancy as a single number blurs together a bunch of different questions, like infant mortality, average length of retirement, etc. An average life expectancy of 82 isn't really relevant to a healthy 80-year-old, or even one in average health.

[cellio]

Yes. They need to factor out infant mortality (I don't know if they do) and environmental factors, at the least. Coal workers probably have a lower life-expectancy than cube-dwellers because of all the gunk they inhale, for instance. Sometimes you at least see smokers/non-smokers broken out, but not always even that.

I suppose people who are in this for a living, like the folks who set your life-insurance rates, have all the data. I just wish a little more of it were included in these reports to the general public, because an unexplained single number is meaningless.