Healthy life expectancy is an important indicator that reflects the healthy and longevity of the population simultaneously. The difference of healthy life expectancy can reflect the inequality of health in a country or region. This article uses a multi-state life table to analyze the trends and changes in the healthy life expectancy of elderly population in China in the past ten years; meanwhile, it calculates the impact of 11 types of factors such as social factors on the difference of the healthy life expectancy of the elderly through the sharpley value decomposition method. The following four important research conclusions are obtained: Firstly, from 2005 to 2018, the degree of difference in the healthy life expectancy of the elderly people in China has increased slightly, with women and rural groups always having higher levels of dificency. Further Theil index decomposition shows that intra-group inequality (rather than inter-group inequality) is the main cause of the above difference. The gender difference in the healthy life expectancy of the elderly population shows a trend of shrinking older people and expanding younger ones. Secondly, marital status is the most important factor influencing changes in healthy life expectancy, but which shows a downward trend year by year. On the contrary, the impact of education level is increasing yearly. After further categorizing 11 types of influencing factors, it is found that “individual characteristics” are the most important factors, followed by “economic factors” and “behavioral factors”, then “environmental factors” have the least impact. Thirdly, the impact of above factors on the healthy life expectancy of the elderly in China shows an upward trend generally, and the characteristics still exist when divided by the urban and rural areas and gender. Finally, the influence of various factors in groups of different urban & rural areas, genders, and marital status are heterogeneous.
