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

[cellio]

Yes. I don't know if they're even factoring out infant mortality. They do distinguish among some ethnic groups, but that's only part of the question.

Speaking from personal rather than statistical interest, the figures I'm most interested in begin "among people who lived to my current age, ...". Filter out all the early killers that didn't kill me, in other words.