People are living longer – But spending more time in poor health

You would expect this though? If the average lifespan were 70 and the "healthspan" (taken from the article to mean the time spent in good health) were 65 that would mean 5 years spent in poor health. If they both go up by 10%, then the average lifespan is now 77, the average healthspan is now 71.5 and the total years spent in poor health is now 5.5. Unhealthy years have gone up, but so have healthy years and total years.

I could hear an argument for how this is to do with the western medical perspective though. We do have a tendency to view healthy as the default state and disease as something that is to be watched for and then gotten rid of when it pops up. An attitude more oriented to the idea that health is something you have to actively maintain every day could potentially help increase total lifespan without a concomitant increase in shitty years.

I wonder about the definition of poor health. When you have a chronic disease it may be managed adequately so you don't have a poor quality of life. So it may be that the article is just talking about chronic diseases--and not poor quality of life.

Could someone clarify?