Description: This article from major US payers describes palliative care as a scaleable means of improving quality and reducing costs during serious and complex illness.

Description: Review of a research project, co-sponsored by the SOA, which examined 83 organizations and over 150 programs that measure the quality and efficiency of hospitals and physicians.

Description: This article provides a detailed description of the unbalanced subsidy provisions in the Affordable Care Act with easy to follow numerical illustrations. An understanding of the illustrative calculations is necessary to understand the subsidy implications. The article highlights some surprising and likely unintended results that will be interest to issuers, employers, consumers, regulators and policymakers. Actuaries can add expertise to their clients and to the public discussion with a proper understanding of the subsidy calculations and the resulting implications.

Description: A rethinking of current provider reimbursement, focusing on incentives instead of simply cutting fees. The recommended 2-pronged approach would feature integrated provider organizations as well as evidence-based decision making organized around episodes of care.

Description: Shannon Brownlee shares her perspectives on the current health care crisis, including: inconsistent treatment patterns across providers and geographic regions, providers lacking evidence-based guidelines, the need for better independent clinical research to establish those guidelines, and the limits to consumerism's potential to fix the crisis.

Description: Approaches to filing, approving and implementing LTC rate increases impact policyholder behavior regarding retaining/modifying their coverage.

Description: As private payers ponders the early adoption of genomic testing to guide treatment pathways, can personalized approaches to care prove financially sound?

Description: Individuals face many risks during different phases of their financial life cycle. These risks in turn have major financial implications on their wealth creation, wealth preservation and wealth distribution aspirations. Traditionally risk taking is viewed negatively in relation to the personal financial-planning domain. In fact, most of the studies linking risk management to personal financial-planning focus primarily on investment and insurance related risks. In contrast, enterprise risk management (ERM) takes a portfolio view of risks right from the personal level to the organization level. The existing literature on ERM is seen as an essential feature of corporate world and there is not much literature available that explicitly addresses the issue of aligning ERM framework to the whole spectrum of personal financial planning. In this backdrop, it seems logical to develop an in-depth study on aligning an ERM framework to a personal-financial planning domain. Accordingly, this conceptual paper, avoiding mathematical jargon, extensively examines the extent to which ERM can be aligned to the personal-financial planning domain. The Study concludes by suggesting how individuals should identify, aggregate, evaluate and address risks across the whole spectrum of personal financial planning domain

Description: Describes actuarial approaches used to quantify the benefit to employers of implementing financial wellness programs for their employees.

Description: Compares how other industries (in this case, Fast Food) researches and tests new products. Provides examples of how the insurance industry can efficiently research and test new product concepts before going to market.