Description: An actuarial model that provides financial incentives to providers to offer patients an approach that can reverse chronic disease and reduce health care costs

Description: The article gives actuaries an introduction to Academy Health, the notable health policy research organization.

Description: Chairperson's Corner discussing actuarial principles and what we as actuaries value in our work.

Description: In many countries, insurers and banks are separately regulated. In some countries, banks and insurers are not allowed to be part of the same conglomerate and share capital. This raises questions about the efficient use of capital and return on equity to shareholders. This is the abstract of an empirical study that views economic capital from a solvency perspective with the focus on downside risk. The key question addressed is 'What efficiencies, if any, are gained by allowing banks and insurers of different types to merge and thus share capital.' We examine to what degree bank and insurer performances have been correlated historically, especially in the downside tail. This case study is based on Canadian banks, life insurers and property-casualty insurers.

Description: The theme of this paper relates to solving portfolio selection problems using linear programming. The authors extend the linear optimization framework for Conditional Value-at-Risk-based portfolio selection problems to optimization over a more general class of risk measure known as the class of Coherent Distortion Risk Measure. From Actuarial Research Clearing House, 2012 Vol. 1.

Description: Essay discussing that the two factors that affect healthcare cost are costs and the fact that people lack coverage.

Description: This paper discussed providing consumers of medical care with transparent and comparable price and quality information to enable them to make economically optimal decisions.

Description: This paper proposes a mandatory universal pension system MUPS which would be a system of fully portable IRA accounts piggy-backed on to existing Social Security withholding.

Description: Responding to Sandy Mackenzie's "Report", these comments primarily suggest additional disclosures for assessing public pension plan financial health.

Description: This study was sponsored by the Society of Actuaries Health Section. This paper explores the relative significance of aging as a determinant of financial cost of health care beyond age 50, with particular attention to the effect for ages 65 and older. The paper presents concepts of aging factors and aging curves, which define relative values between ages for utilization or cost of health care services. General conclusions are drawn from Medicare data that utilization and cost differ by age, but that aging factors vary across services and may be less significant at very old ages. The author then turns to the question of measuring the significance of an aging curve assumption and what accuracy is lost in the simpler alternative of a single value across an age range.