Corrigendum to “Use of Healthy Life Expectancy to Estimate Future Provision of Household and Personal Services” [Journal of Forensic Economics 29(1), 2020, 101-112]

What the paper says

This note corrects errors in Table 3 of Edward Foster's article (2020, p. 107). The original paper was addressed to forensic economists who use, or contemplate using, healthy life expectancy (HLE) to estimate the period for future loss of household or personal services due to death or catastrophic injury of the service provider. The paper's purpose was to alert readers to some features of HLE, as originally defined by the United States Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and published by Kurt Krueger (2019), that could influence the way one might use HLE in that application.Table 3, “The Distribution of HLE Over the Lifespan,” addresses implications of assuming that but for the service provider's injury or death, he or she would have been able to provide services at the same level as before, to the end of the healthy life expectancy. Those with some actuarial education would know that the assumption is inaccurate because it front-loads healthy life years: HLE is calculated as the sum of annual increments to healthy life to the end of the table, that is to age 100 in Krueger's HLE tables. For integer age x ranging from 25 to 70, and age y = x + HLEx, column 4 of Table 3 gives the years of healthy life accumulated from age x up to age y; column 5 shows column 4 as a percentage of the total HLEx.Thus, for a male age 25 with HLE of 42.43 years to age 67.43, only 33.14 healthy life years, 78% of the total, will have been accumulated by that age; one must accumulate his healthy life years to age 100 to reach the full HLE of 42.43 years. To assume that the service provider at age 25 would have been able to continue providing services at his former level out to age 67.43 is to front-load those services, by assuming that he would have provided 42.43 years of healthy life in a period which would, on average, provide only 33.14 years.Columns 4 and 5 of the original Table 3 are accurate for males, but not for females. Table 3 in this note provides the correction; as column 5 shows, the correction shows the front-loading for females closely in line with that for males, with a range of 80% to 65% for females aged 25 to 70, compared to a range of 78% to 65% for males. An additional error occurs in column 8 for females at age 50; the correct value is 0.75 healthy life years after age 90, recorded in the original paper as 0.13 years, wrong on its face based on the values for other ages. Finally, the footnote to Table 3 in the original paper misstates the formula for calculating column 4 by writing column (3) in place of column (2).This note also acknowledges a change in assumptions in Krueger (2020) compared to those used in Krueger (2019 and earlier years). The population that the HLE tables are intended to represent includes those confined to institutions such as nursing homes, prisons, long-term care hospitals and other care facilities. Krueger (2020) applies healthy life years of zero to those residents, because they would be unable to provide household or personal services to unconfined care recipients. Earlier HLE tables had assumed positive values for those residents, appropriate for HLE as an index of public health for the population but not as an indicator of availability to provide household or personal services. (Foster, 2020, p. 106)