Disability components for an index of health

Health programs and activities today include a great variety of public and private efforts directed toward both fatal and nonfatal conditions. Most accepted summary measures of a population's health status, on the other hand, are based on death rates alone. They tell little about the health of the living and therefore provide an in-adequate basis for assessing the need for and success of many health measures. Consequently there has been considerable interest in recent decades in the development of summary indexes of health that reflect information on the living population as well as on the level of mortality. A previous report in this series examined the problem of determining what va ~iables might be used in constructing such measures. The re-port emphasized the need to devise indexes suited to specific objectives of measurement, and it focused on the limited goal of developing a more comprehensive index of changing health status for the United States as a whole. For that purpose a single index based on both mortality and morbidity rates was identified as a potentially useful device.