Description: Discusses insurance company considerations and approaches when dealing with the complexities of deferred lives within pension plans.

Description: View The Impact of Disaster Events on Investments – Contagion Channels Perspective.

Description: This paper reviews state and federal regulation of investment advisers as it applies to personal actuaries and advocates action steps.

Description: Life and annuity markets around the world have seen increasingly complex investment-combined products, including universal life, fixed indexed annuities, variable annuities with a wide variety of guaranteed benefits, indexed variable annuities, etc. Insurance companies are facing unprecedented exposure to financial risks in addition to traditional mortality and longevity risks. The risk assessment and modeling for such complex designs by conventional methods often focus heavily on their market competitiveness and profitability. However, there seems to be a lack of quantifiable and systematic approach to assess investment risks associated with investment combined products. The objective of the proposed work is to develop a framework for quantifying and analyzing various forms of contractual designs and showcase different techniques to assess the trade-off between competitive contractual designs and their practical implications with regard to the difficulty of risk management.

Description: Feature article discussing how technology is affecting the reinsurance business.

Description: Discusses the paper on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS, entitled “AIDS, HIV Mortality and Life Insurance,” by Michael Cowell and Walter Hoskins, and the potential impact of AIDS on the insurance industry in North America. Also solicits comments from other SOA members about the issue.

Description: When building stress tests, modelers need to consider worst cases that are plausible. The most useful and robust scenarios begin qualitatively, with a narrative or story. Consistent quantitative relationships are then developed.

Description: The Society of Actuaries’ (SOA) Aging and Retirement Strategic Research Program in collaboration with the International Association of Black Actuaries (IABA) and the Organization of Latino Actuaries (OLA) are pleased to publish this essay collection on Aging and Retirement Issues in People of Different Races and Ethnicities. This effort explores how differences in wealth and retirement outcomes are experienced by people of different races and ethnicities and promotes a better understanding of the underlying issues surrounding the differences.

Description: COVID-19 and the accompanying policy changes have disrupted virtually everyone’s personal and professional lives. In April 2021, the Society of Actuaries (SOA) surveyed members and candidates to understand the impact of COVID-19 on the careers of actuaries and aspiring actuaries. The survey was sent to 26,101 members and candidates. Approximately 7% (1,912) responded and included demographic information. In addition, the SOA investigated actuarial exam progress at an aggregate level. Here are highlights of the findings.

Description: This session explores the far-reaching changes to how clinical data will be sourced, processed and consumed in many payer use cases including risk adjustment, quality measurement, care management, claims adjudication, prior authorizations, and other payer functions. Robust, interoperable data exchange is a prerequisite for value-based care. Clinical data will be increasingly accessible to augment administrative (claims) data via standardized Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR, pronounced 'fire'), at a fraction of the cost of a accessing a traditional medical record and in real-time. On May 1, 2020, HHS issued a final rule implementing interoperability and the patient access provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016, although enforcement has been delayed into 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The new regulations promote, “HHS’s vision and strategy for achieving a health information ecosystem within which all individuals, their personal representatives, their health care providers, and their payers are able to send, receive, find, and use electronic health information in a manner that is appropriate, secure, timely, and reliable to support the health and wellness of individuals through informed, shared decision-making, as well as to support consumer choice of payers and providers.”Once enforcement begins, CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), have the authority to mandate adoption of interoperability requirements, and also penalize payers and providers for non-compliance or the delay and withholding of data.This ‘digital transformation’ of the clinical data ecosystem has far-reaching implications for enabling technologies including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and entire segments of services and vendors. It will eliminate many departmental barriers, duplication and error sources for health plans and impact every department and the underlying economics of delivering and managing care.