We spend more time sick now.

• Position: YOUR LIFE

Increased life expectancy in the U.S. has not been accompanied by more years of good health, reveals research from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. A 20-year-old today can expect to live one less healthy year over his or her life span than a 20-year-old a decade ago, even though lifo expectancy has grown.

Since the 1970s, the probability of a 65-year-old surviving to age 85 doubled, from about a 20% chance to 40%. Many researchers presumed that the same forces allowing people to live longer, including better health behaviors and medical advances, also would delay the onset of disease and allow people to spend fewer years of their lives with debilitating illness.

However, research from Eileen Crimmins, AARP chair in gerontology, and Hiram Beltran-Sanchez, a postdoctoral fellow, shows that average "morbidly' or the period of lifo spent with serious disease or loss of functional mobility, has increased. "We have always assumed that each generation will be healthier and live longer than the prior one," Crimmins says. "However, the compression of morbidity may be as illusory as immortality."

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While people might be expected to live more years with disease simply as a function of living longer in general, the researchers show that the average number of healthy years has decreased since 1998. We spend fewer years of our lives without disease, even though we live longer.

Moreover, the number of people who report...