A multistate analysis of active life expectancy.

With today's lower mortality rates, longer expectations of life, and new medical technologies, the nation's health policy focus has shifted from emphasis on individual survival to emphasis on personal health and independent living. Using longitudinal data sets and new methodological techniques, researchers have begun to assess active life expectancies, estimating not only how long a subpopulation can expect to live beyond each age, but what fractions of the expected remaining lifetime will be lived as independent, dependent, or institutionalized. New ideas are addressed, applying recently developed multistate life table methods to Waves One and Two of the Massachusetts Health Care Panel Study. Expectations of active life are presented for those 65 and older who initially are in one of two functional states of well-being. Included are expectations of life, for those, for example, who were independent and remained so, or those who were dependent and became independent. Although public health officials are concerned about the number of elderly who cease being independent, preliminary analysis shows that a significant number of the dependent elderly regain their independence, a situation which needs to be addressed in health care planning.