HEALTHY PEOPLE 2010

Healthy People 2010

Healthy People 2010

Introduction

Healthy People 2010: Understanding and Improving Health1 highlighted the importance of increasing and maximizing both years and quality of healthy life. Progress toward this goal is currently assessed by measuring life expectancy and healthy life expectancies. (www.healthypeople.gov) These assessments result in the following conclusions:

* Life expectancy continues to improve for the populations that could be assessed in the midcourse review.

* Women continue to have a longer life expectancy than men, and the white population has a longer life expectancy than the black population.

* Three different measures of healthy life expectancy demonstrate gender and racial differences: expected years in good or better health, expected years free of activity limitations, and expected years free of selected chronic diseases.

* Expected years in good or better health and expected years free of activity limitations increased slightly, and expected years free of selected chronic conditions decreased.

Discussion

Life Expectancy

Life expectancy is the average number of years persons born in a given year could be expected to live base on the age-specific death rates in that year. Since the launch of Healthy People 2010, life expectancy at birth and at age 65 has increased for all groups discussed here. In 2001-02, life expectancy for the total population was 77.2 years, an increase from 76.8 years in 1999-2000. Improvements in overall life expectancy are likely related to improvements in disease-specific death rate objectives within the Healthy People 2010 focus areas. (www.amsa.org)

Measuring Quality and Years of Healthy Life

Quality of life is affected by changes in physical health, psychological health, social relationships, level of independence, the environment, and personal beliefs. Healthy People 2010 focuses on how changes in health status and activity limitations affect Americans at the population level. Given the multidimensional nature of health, assessing quality and years of healthy life is a much more complex process than measuring life expectancy, and the field is evolving. (www.amsa.org) Various measures are used nationally and internationally to measure healthy life.

Goal 2: Eliminate Health Disparities

The second goal of Healthy People 2010 stems from the observation that there are substantial disparities among populations in specific measures of health, life expectancy, and quality of life. The second goal is to eliminate health disparities that occur by race and ethnicity, gender, education, income, geographic location, (www.amsa.org) disability status, or sexual orientation.1 As discussed in the section on Healthy People objectives and as shown in Figure 5 and Table 3, there has been widespread improvement in objectives for nearly all of the populations associated with these characteristics. However, progress toward the target for individual populations and progress toward the goal to eliminate disparities are independent of each other.10 Improvements for individual populations—even improvements for all of the populations for a characteristic—do not necessarily ensure the elimination of disparities. This section focuses specifically on relative disparities between populations and changes in these relative disparities over time, regardless of whether the rates for specific populations are moving toward or away from the targets for each objective (see the Technical ...