Description: European insurance regulation pretends to capture and rely on the 1-year 1-in-200 VaR. But there cannot exist any scientific calibration of such measure. Why?

Description: An excerpt from a presentation at the 2014 Living to 100 Symposium, this article describes an open-source model for use by actuaries attempting to estimate future health benefit costs, discusses its strengths and limitations, and projects that spending for those age over 65 will take more than $13 trillion by 2055, about 50 percent of total medical expenditures.

Description: The influenza pandemic of 1918-20 is recognized as having generally taken place in three waves, starting in the northern spring and summer of 1918. This pattern of three waves, however, was not universal: in some locations influenza seems to have persisted into or returned in 1920. The recorded statistics of influenza morbidity and mortality are likely to be a significant understatement. Limitations of these data can include nonregistration, missing records, misdiagnosis, and nonmedical certification, and may also vary greatly between locations. Further research has seen the consistent upward revision of the estimated global mortality of the pandemic, which a 1920s calculation put in the vicinity of 21.5 million. A 1991 paper revised the mortality as being in the range 24.7-39.3 million. This paper suggests that it was of the order of 50 million. However, it must be acknowledged that even this vast figure may be substantially lower than the real toll, perhaps as much as 100 percent understated.

Description: A guide to the protocols and rules necessary to ensure an accurate savings comparison when using an historical claims repricing in the PBM RFP process.

Description: This paper by John Mereu describes a method for mathematically computing the expected loss under a group life contract in excess of a stated limit. The paper also shows how to compute the variance and standard deviation of the stop-loss claim and suggests how the method can be extended to group insurance benefits where the claim amount per certificate is not fixed. Paper is followed by discussions from several people

Description: This article describes a method that can be useful when re-fitting a risk score model to a population of only moderate size. Learn how to use concepts like ridge regression to train a model with partial credibility.

Description: An approach to quantify medical intervention savings when medical claims data is not available by leveraging overlapping measurement techniques.

Description: This paper will investigate the problem in estimating mortality rates using data obtained from insurance company records.

Description: Feature article providing an in-depth look at using genetic algorithms.