The trend of living a healthy life longer has reversed – and not just because of COVID-19

I’ve written columns on the topic of healthy life expectancy before but never through the lens of income or gender. In addition, this week I’ll look at the impact the COVID-19 pandemic had on healthy life expectancy.

Healthy life expectancy (HLE) is the number of years we can expect to live in good health, taking into account vision, hearing, speech, ambulation, dexterity, emotion, cognition and pain.

HLE is shorter than total life expectancy, since most of us can expect to face one or more serious health problems in the last five to 10 years of our lives. In the charts, I am measuring HLE from age 65, since that is more relevant to retirees and near-retirees than measuring it from birth.

As the charts show, HLE varies by sex and income level. Women in the top income quintile – the top 20 per cent – can generally expect the longest healthy life expectancy while men in the bottom income quintile will have the shortest.

That said, the difference in HLE by income level between the top and the middle quintile is surprisingly small – less than two years. The difference by sex is also less than two years.

Note that HLE was increasing for both sexes and at both income levels up to and including the year 2017. In the case of high-income men for example, it rose by more than two years between 2000 and 2017.

I suspect this increase is probably owing to a combination of medical advances and better lifestyle choices, in particular, the decline in the prevalence of smoking.

It may not be that simple, however, since HLE started to drop in 2019 and kept on falling until 2023. One obvious reason is COVID-19 but that doesn’t explain why healthy life expectancy was lower in 2019 than in 2017 since the pandemic had not started yet.

I will keep monitoring HLE trends, since older Canadians need to know how many healthy years of life they can expect.

Frederick Vettese is former chief actuary of Morneau Shepell (now Telus Health) and author of Retirement Income for Life.