health expectancy
Feb. 28th, 2005 05:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioI 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.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-01 10:15 pm (UTC)