New approaches are needed to value benefit plans subject to unilateral changes or termination. The paper focuses on postretirement health benefits, but the thesis may be relevant to any flow not guaranteed by law or accumulating funds. This paper provides a basis for discussion of assumptions that are appropriate when the plan sponsor can unilaterally and dramatically change future cash flows. The paper discusses how actuaries might best approach measurement situations where further plan reductions, or outright terminations, are to be anticipated. It introduces refinements and briefly discusses how each would fit with the usual actuarial model and how differences might affect behavior. These ideas are related to financial economics and the Bader-Gold paper Reinventing Pension Actuarial Science. Before concluding, the wider topic of discount rate selection is briefly addressed.

Summaries of articles and article links on PBSS.

This is an article explaining the options employers have under the Medicare Part D, or the Prescription Drug Improvement and Medicare Modernization Act - MMA - that took effect in January 2006. The article discusses 4 options under the MMA with the advantages and disadvantages of each.

This article describes Singapore's Central Provident Fund and how it involves government, employers and employees in a cooperative partnership for mandatory savings and investment to assist with the primary lifetime goals of home ownership, medical care and retirement provision.

This article is a summary of the World Bank Policy Research Report entitled Averting the Old-Age Crisis: Policies to Protect the Old and Promote Growth. This report concludes that a mix of systems is more appropriate than single pillar systems. It recommends a publicly managed system with the limited goals of reducing poverty among the old, a privately managed mandatory savings system and voluntary savings.

Article describing some of the significant changes occurring in Poland after the fall of the Berlin Wall with a focus on life insurance and conversion to a private pension market.

In the United States today, there is much talk about the effect of the “baby boomer” generation ranging from the effect on our Social Security system, the increased market for healthcare products, as well as the effect that their withdrawals will have on the stock market. Yet overseas, there is a revolutionary change taking place that is much more fundamental than simply an aging population. As this article is being published, there are numerous countries that are seeing the first generation of their population retire with an explicitly described and funded social security benefit for each of those individuals.

This paper models the extent of the tax dollars being lost by the government today because of Qualified Pension Plans and IRAs, and then goes on to project the extra revenue that will accrue to the government from these same pension plans when the baby boomers retire.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how an actual fund, for any given contribution rate, would develop as a proportion of the full fund in a social insurance program. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1981, Vol. 33.

This presentation was made at the 1975 Spring Cincinnati Joint Meeting of the Conference of Actuaries in Public Practice and Society of Actuaries and it highlights the following issues: What are the retirement needs of a population?, what are suitable methods of providing social insurance, private pensions,and savings?, what are the political, economic, and sociological implications of various solutions?, and what perspective on this problem does Canadian experience provide.