1. Distinguishing health expectancies and health-adjusted life expectancies from quality-adjusted life years.
2. Healthy People 2000: National Health Promo
3. tion and Disease Prevention Objectives. Washington, DC: US Dept of Health and Human Services; 1991. DHHS publication PHS 91-5212.
4. The Annotation section of the June issue of the American Joumal of Public Health discusses issues related to combining quantity and quality of life for monitoring health levels.' In their efforts to clarify distinctions between different types of measures Robine et al. seem to have misunderstood the methods that were used to calculate years of healthy life for Healthy People 2000. 2
5. In drafting Healthy People 2000, the authors were well aware of the methodological distinctions between years of healthy life and active life expectancy as well as other forms of adjusted life expectancy. To make the distinctions apparent to readers of Healthy People 2000 who might be unfamiliar with methods of adjusting life expectancy for disability and health-related quality of life, the term "quality-adjusted life years" was either included in parentheses or in a footnote to the term "years of healthy life."