Description: The impact of benefit design on the cost of Aggregate Stop-Loss Coverage. Issue No. 42.

Description: Feature article discussing the American Academy of Actuaries Academy review of the various risk-based capital RBC formulas for health insurance products.

Description: A comparison of fully insured medical insurance to two self- funding alternatives , specific and aggregate and level funding .

Description: Excess Reinsurance is a coverage purchased by insurance carriers to limit loss in a year from any one claim. This article addresses the issues when purchasing medical excess reinsurance on a medical portfolio. The most important consideration in the reinsurance purchasing decision is determining the risk objectives of the organization. The proper risk analysis by the carrier or in conjunction with its reinsurer will address the following questions: What is predictable risk versus unpredictable risk?

Description: Over the years I have come to believe that the nature vs nurture debate is fundamentally flawed, in that it tends to exclude an increasingly important third influence: culture.

Description: Cell and Gene Therapy (CGT) are life-changing treatments where conditions such as cancer, hemophilia, spinal muscular atrophy and blindness are being cured. These are great for individuals and society, but the treatment costs are expensive which is bad for payers and reinsurers. This article explores ways for health reinsurance actuaries to participate in the space and evaluate the risk associated with these treatments

Description: podcast update of the reinsurance section

Description: This article looks at stochastic techniques actuaries can use to quantify the non-market risks in insurance products and how stochastic techniques can be used in the evaluation of reinsurance arrangements.

Description: Contains two separate articles, called notes. The first note, “A note on correlation in mean variance portfolio theory,” is an elementary discussion of how negative correlation coefficients can be, given any set of N random variables. The second note, “Two essential formulas in actuarial science and financial mathematics,” gives a more or less self-contained introduction to Jensen’s inequality and to another formula, which the author decided to call the “survival function expectation formula.”

Description: Medical stop-loss reinsurance continues to play a vital role in containing employers’ health care costs. Managing general underwriters [MGUs], who originally handled these programs, have lost market share to large direct writers. This article discusses how health care reform and highly disciplined underwriting tools offer growth opportunities to MGUs.