Abstract: Healthy life expectancy (HLE) and disability adjusted life year (DALY) focus on both mortality and non-fatal health effects, which are comprehensive measures of national life quality. It is beneficial to the interdisciplinary research of population health measurement to broaden the academic horizon. In a broad sense, both of the two healthy indicators extend the healthy concept and need a standard life table as the basis of measurement. HLE reflects health level and focuses on the survival time of pure health state and its sociological consequences. DALY reflects negative health levels and focuses on the epidemiological consequences of disease types and single disease under the disease classification system. HLE is mainly focused on functional and experiential indicators, but it is insensitive to the measurement of healthy consequences of infectious disease and mental disorders; however, the research results of DALY are significant for reference. The measurement of the two indexes affect the public health policy from many aspects, including the implied social ethical value, the decision of public resource allocation and the equity of resource allocation.