Description: This report reviews retirement planning software programs currently available to individuals and their professional advisors. The report does not rate or recommend specific programs. Rather, it explains how programs that are currently available work, and what features can be improved.

Description: A divisive confrontation over health care pricing is almost inevitable over the next few years. What will ultimately happen is a political decision, not an actuarial one—but it will have major consequences for the trend in health care costs and the divergence between public and private insurance premiums.

Description: The COVID-19 pandemic initially caused some health care services to shift away from in-person transactions to a digital form, including telehealth, e-mails, remote patient monitoring and other forms of communication. If sustained, numerous effects and counter-effects both in the cost and quality of care as well as long-term outcomes for patient health may emerge.

Description: Some insurance products on the market today accelerate the death benefit by paying a portion of the benefit before death under certain prescribed conditions. The more common of these products are long-term-care and dread disease riders to life policies. This paper presents generic formulas for calculating the cost of morbidity that would be multiplied by the policy's net amount at risk in an asset share pricing calculation. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1990, Vol. 42.

Description: To advise the management of a company on the most prominent disruptors that are going to increase its health expenditure in the next 5 years.

Description: This is the A Review of the Demography of Retirement in the United States paper authored by Jacob S. Siegel for Session 2B of the January 13-15, 2020 Living to 100 Symposium in Orlando, Florida.

Description: Because of its complexity, ensuring the security of cyberspace is one of today’s most significant challenges. As the cyber environment becomes more integrated with the real world, the direct impact of cyber security incidents on business is also heightened. This study aims to develop a generic model that can be applied by any organization. For the validation of the developed cyber risk analysis method, simulations and sensitivity analysis will be performed.

Description: This paper solves the pension benefit allocation problem using an extremely simple accounting approach. It presents a simple accounting argument, which says that the cost for like units of production should increase at the rate of inflation. If we assume that the appropriate units of production for an employee are inflation-adjusted salary, this rationale leads to projected unit credit with the benefit apportioned by interest-adjusted salary [PUCIAS] as the appropriate funding method for pensions. This same rationale can be extended to post-service medical care funding. For post-service medical care, however, the rationale does not lead to PUCIAS, since the rates of inflation for medical care and salary do not cancel. There is also a question whether inflation-adjusted salary should be used as the units of production for post-service medical care. When it is, it is still important avoid aggregating groups with different salary and promotion patterns. When it is not, the widget accounting arguments still hold as far unit costs increasing with the rate of medical care inflation.

Description: Appendixes for the Evaluating ACO Efficiency: Risk Adjustment within Episodes study. The study aims to answer the question of how much of an episode’s cost and use of specific services can be attributed to the patient’s own health status, as opposed to being driven by other factors such as the care setting, patient preference, and provider practice patterns. In other words, do episode costs vary so widely because of patient characteristics, including health status, or are they related to other, nonclinical factors?

Description: These reports cover two Canadian topics. First is a summary of the Carter Commission Report that proposes a radically different tax system. Second is a report on the status of government involvement in health care.