Description: The South African life insurance industry contains the largest life insurance market in Africa, it is highly sophisticated and highly regulated. In the years 2020 and2021, the industry suffered significant mortality losses due toCovid-19. What can we learn from this experience in South Africa?

Description: Discusses the market, demographic, and macroeconomic factors that affect actuaries' choices for the assumptions they use in the pricing and valuation of many insurance products.

Description: After years of discussion and debate, PrinciplesBased Reserving (PBR) is finally a reality. Small insurance companies have a unique opportunity to decide between electing for the company-wide exemption or adopting the PBR methods. This article discusses the benefits and challenges of the options available to small insurers under VM-20 as well as best practices that have been found along the way.

Description: Brief discussion on recent published experience studies and RFPs.

Description: Future mortality improvement has been a common assumption in life insurance and annuity pricing and forecasting for many years. However, experience over the last decade suggests this might be an assumption that merits reconsideration in the United States. This article will take a closer look at factors that impact mortality improvement trends and discuss why insurers may want to reevaluate product designs to better manage the associated mortality risk. We then introduce a product idea with this in mind, where premiums are based on a life expectancy index and insurers share the risk (and opportunity) or mortality improvement with policyholders.

Description: This article provides a very high level overview of accelerated underwriting programs and their history in the US marketplace. It then discusses setting up an actuarial control cycle for such products and some items related to risk management that are helpful in this setting. Pros and cons of retrospective studies, random holdouts, targeted holdouts and post issue analysis are discussed. A mathematical example of how to estimate the mortality impact of such programs from early emerging experience is provided.

Description: This article discusses a study of the impact of the drug infliximab on Crohn's disease patients. This study had been approved in response to an SOA request for proposals for research on the health cost and utilization effects of a specific prescription drug.

Description: ACA risk adjustment is intended to "bridge the gap" between allowed rates and actuarial rates. If risk adjustment methodology is not bridging that gap & becomes an additional input to pricing formulae, it is not serving its intended purpose.

Description: The Actuary Vol. 22, No. 3. This editorial discusses the impact of the AIDS epidemic on financial security programs and what to do about it.

Description: This article details different methods for calculating mortality impact associated with new underwriting programs. A common simplified calculation is compared and contrasted with two first principles approaches. The strengths and weaknesses of both approaches are discussed.