Health is important, together with knowledge and skills, to influence the value of labour force as Human capital, which is a stock that will contribute to present and future increase in production value. Health is also important to the level of well being and individual independence that influences the expectations and desires of human beings for non-productive activities, we call it own value. The value of health may be defined as a stock in a point of time, but it may vary between two points of time due to genetic, environment and behavior factors. Expected or effective depreciation between two points of time may imply a demand for investments in health, which corresponds to flows of health services and activities carried on by individuals. The opportunity cost of these flows should be compared with the possible increase in the value of health capital. However, this value may be ambiguous, because there are differences between the meaning of health as human capital and health as a value for well being important to own value.
Workers with a high level of knowledge but with poor health may contribute very little or may not contribute at all to production in society. Both attributes in labour force are necessary and important but knowledge and skills contribute with different qualities to human capital compared with health.
For the population above 65 years that is not affected by “early retirement” the value of health as human capital may also be important and may decrease in the future due to shortages of financial resources that follows increased expectation of life years. Decreased liquidity for transfer payments may limit investments in health for aged people. There are two immediate solutions: 1 - decreasing transfer payments by decreasing the level of pension payments or increasing retirement age; 2 - increasing taxes for working population. A combination of these two is of course possible. However, these two types of policies may imply that health depreciation will slow down if investments will increase the value of health. This occurs if there is a positive correlation between the level of health in the population above 65 years and their willingness to work. Health is then a value that influences human capital in all ages, even if this influence may happen differently in different age and vocational groups.