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Life Expectancies in Specific Health States: Results From a Joint Model of Health Status and Mortality of Older Persons
- Demography
- Population Association of America
- Volume 38, Number 4, November 2001
- pp. 525-536
- 10.1353/dem.2001.0038
- Article
- Additional Information
With the trend toward aging, increases in health care expenditures are expected. Insight into (future) needs for care services requires a taxonomy of older persons' health conditions: how health status develops as people age and how these health conditions determine residual life expectancy. In this paper we provide this information for the Netherlands. We apply a flexible nonparametric method--the Grade of Membership method--to a national database and summarize the multidimensional concept of health status into a limited set of interpretable indices. We then use these indices in our panel data model for health status and mortality. The model results are used to calculate age-health profiles and expected residual lifetimes in specific health states.