Description: During the past few years, performance, cost, and risk trends for Medigap products have undergone substantial changes. Some of these trends could ease cost pressures on Medigap insurers, while others might increase them. Part 1 of this Issue Brief article discusses current changing trends and considerations around about how they are impacting Medigap.

Description: Discussion of how to mature value-based contracts between health insurers and provider organizations to improve population health and financial sustainability. Centers around contract parameter consistency, revenue predictability and risk assessment. Intended audience are health plan and ACO actuaries and leaders. Authors are writing from the provider perspective in value-based contracts.

Description: This article describes Medicare Supplement and short-term care products in more detail, and we compare their risk profiles. We explore the concept that these two products—when offered together—may provide a complementary hedge of certain policyholder behavior risks.

Description: Enterprise Risk Management is often thought to be synonymous with managing an insurance company toward financial objectives with a focus on insurance-specific risks. Some might argue though that operational risks are the crux of all risks confronted by an insurance company and ultimately drive the company’s outcomes.Operational risk is the risk of impact on financial outcomes due to operational events, involving internal systems, personnel, procedures or controls, and also external events. Operational risk exists in all business activities, covering fraud, human error, accounting errors, legal actions and system failures. All of these activities could occur during the course of conducting day-to-day business operations. Additionally, insurance executives must consider the pace of change in the external environment and potential impacts on their business. This presentation is focused on operational risks, current and emerging, faced by health insurance companies.

Description: 1993 SOA Spring Meeting, San Diego. This session was about the Latin-American insurance market. Topics included: 1. Size, growth, regulations, products, distribution, marketing. 2. Market entry, business strategies, cultural issues, local staffing. 3. Level of activity for U.S. companies.

Description: Overview of plans designed to cover out-of-pocket medical costs as a supplement to major medical coverage.

Description: 1992 SOA Regional Meeting, Chicago. This discussion is about direct marketing growth in the 1980s, sustaining the growth in the 1990s, regulatory constraints in the 1990s, impact of continuing production cost increases, new product designs, and declining response rate.

Description: 1992 SOA Regional Meeting, Anaheim. This session addressed the product management actuary and the product management process. Topics discussed : 1. The monitoring of the environment and how that monitoring leads to the generation of ideas. 2. Consideration of how those ideas are affected by distribution, marketing, and organizational issues. 3. The setting of assumptions. 4. How to get different areas of your company to work together, and ways to bring the product to market as quickly as possible. 5. How to manage business once your company places it on the books.

Description: On average, contracts receiving their first star rating receive 3.20 stars, compared to existing or established contracts receiving 3.90 stars on average. This 0.70 disparity in quality ratings creates significant hardship on new contracts when this lower star rating decreases their payments in the following calendar year. This article explores the disparity in Medicare Advantage Star Ratings between contracts receiving their first star ratings (“New” contracts) and existing contracts, including: 1. Understanding what happens to Medicare Advantage Payments when contracts receive lower star ratings? – What is the Star Rating cliff and why does it matter to new contracts? 2. Explaining when a contract receives their first star rating and how much enrollment this requires – When does the Star Rating cliff occur? 3. Noting which specific star measures “New” contracts struggle with, including those contracts under large parent organizations, contracts with rapid growth, and all other new contracts. – How can my contract avoid the Star Rating cliff?

Description: As actuaries in health care, we spend most of our time focused on reviewing claims, enrollment and clinical data. That information is captured while patients are in health care facilities. Yet most people spend only a small fraction of their time in these facilities. This article explores what types of data are available to actuaries the provide a more holistic view of the member so that a members physical and emotional needs, the social determinants of health can be taken into consideration along with their clinical needs. Two uses cases are presented so actuaries can see how these types of analyses can be leveraged to improve clinical, operational, and financial performance of risk bearing health entities. Understanding the customer (member) not just the patient enables actuaries to provide new insights and values to our stakeholders across a wide range of business and risk applications.