One of the biggest stories in the UK in recent days was the revelation that the country’s “healthy life expectancy” has cratered in as little as half a decade. The number of years the average Briton spends in good health fell from just over 63 in 2019 to 61 by 2023, according to analysis by the Health Foundation think-tank.
There are good reasons to be concerned that Britain may have a problem with working-age wellbeing. So expanding our measure of population health beyond the life-or-death binary of average lifespan is an admirable goal: we need to account for the quality of years lived. But I worry that using a catch-all and imperfect measure risks muddying rather than clarifying the picture of what is going wrong, and thus where efforts to improve health should be concentrated.
The first issue is that healthy life expectancy is a crude blend of two very different things: life expectancy (the most precise statistic in all of demography, a simple tabulation of population and deaths) and self-reported health status (a much less objective concept and one which is well known to have several drawbacks).