Description: Accurate forecasts of future health care expenditures for cohorts of elderly individuals can be especially difficult. Current techniques use average per capita costs, based on local experience, adjusted for the cohort's age, sex, institutionalization, and welfare status distribution. This paper presents a method to adjust such per capita cost estimates to reflect more accurately the likely health status of a particular cohort. The adjustment uses the cause-of-mortality profile in the local population, which is a readily available tabulation known to be highly correlated with a major proportion of total medical care expenditures for people beyond age 65. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1984, Vol. 36.

Description: The Canadian public health care delivery system continues to experience growing needs for increased funding. The total health care delivery system today costs Canadians $98 billion a year or about 9.7 percent of GDP. Of that total cost, 71 percent is paid by the government, which means the taxpayers. While that may pale in comparison to the costs in the U.S., it does make the Canadian system one of the five most expensive health care delivery systems in the world. While today’s cost pressures are of major concern, of even more concern are the costs being projected by many participants in the current health care debate for the period when the Baby Boom makes higher demands on the Canadian health care delivery system. Traditional projection methods, however, do not differentiate between the elderly who survive the year versus those who die as to their use of health care systems. This paper first looks at the impact that this differentiation could have on projected costs. Second, the paper looks at the impact that the wide use of Advance Directives [also called Living Wills] might have on future health care costs and some of the issues surrounding their use. From Actuarial Research Clearing House 2004, Vol. 1.

Description: Recap of content contained in the January 2014 issue of the Health Watch newsletter.

Description: Discussion of the impact of the ACA on RBS and required surplus for a health plan

Description: Panel discusses trends in large health claims, recent experience, and future expectations, as well as the impact of managed care on large individual health claims under self-insured programs and under an HMO setting. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 25, No. 2.

Description: This is an article about how our business environment has changed and how actuaries must evolve in order to retain their value to employers.