American HALE at midlife: An analysis based on HRS

The role of education and race in explaining disparities in health-adjusted life expectancy (HALE)
for Americans in the age group 45-64 is examined. We compute severity-weighted prevalence of
diseases with comorbidity adjustments, and map the information onto 21 disabling conditions from
Health and Retirement Study (HRS) over 2000-2016. The approach allows us to evaluate the
importance of major disease and risk factors that explain the dynamics of life expectancy and
HALE in recent years, and to find that Americans have been experiencing higher prevalence of
various diseases and risk factors long before the recent decline in life expectancy in 2014.