Determining Health Expectancies

Health expectancies were developed to address the important question of whether or not we are exchanging longer life for poorer health – replacing quality by quantity. Health expectancies extend the concept of life expectancy to morbidity and disability by providing a means of dividing life expectancy into life spent in various states of good and bad health. Being independent of the size of populations and of their age structure, health expectancies thus allow direct comparison of the different groups that constitute populations: sexes, socio-professional categories, regions. This book brings together for the first time, the major works of REVES* over the past ten years. …