Description: Enhanced or impaired annuities are life annuities underwritten to reflect annuitants' actual mortality. They are not currently prevalent in the U.S. or Canada, where life annuities assume low mortality and are thus unfair for impaired lives. This paper looks at the present annuity marketplace in the United States and Canada. It also reviews the underwriting and marketing of life annuities in the United Kingdom where “enhanced” life annuities are available for a broader cross section of the marketplace. It also reviews the use of P&C risk classification techniques and how they might apply to the annuity marketplace as well as potential legal constraints on broader risk classification for life annuities.

Description: Top 10 myths and truths about EHRs.

Description: Discusses the rapidly growing AIDS epidemic and its impact on traditional underwriting principles for life insurance and health insurance.

Description: Discussion of the selling of life insurance to the middle income market through banks and with the support of new technologies and underwriting processes.

Description: There are certain occasions when the knowledge we have gained in our jobs carries over into our personal lives. For instance, developing insurance products certainly helps when it comes time to buy an insurance policy. Recently, one of the authors had the experience of giving his 91-year-old grandmother, Nanny as she is affectionately called, an Extended Delayed Word Recall DWR test. This article will show that DWR tests are a powerful predictor of mortality in the elderly. As the population ages and more and more life insurance is being applied for at the older ages, having a DWR test in an underwriting arsenal is like comfort food for an actuary.

Description: In North America, the proportion of elderly persons now in the population is about 13 percent and is expected to rise to 20 percent by the year 2030. Insurers face a new wave of insurance candidates over ages 65, 70 and 75 with risk assessment challenges in underwriting the health of old age risks.

Description: This session focused on Underwriting, particularly addressing problems with traditional underwriting classification, new and acceptable classifications, possible transition problems. Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 7, No. 3.

Description: As companies implement PBR, this article outlines challenges regarding the treatment of accelerated underwriting under VM-20 and in light of future innovation.

Description: The article focuses on the use of predictive analytics in the development of experience studies, pros and cons of using predictive analytics versus traditional techniques, and the implications for setting assumptions and improving profitability.

Description: This article describes an interesting decision entered by the Florida Supreme Court. It was held that an insurance company’s failure to investigate circumstances relating to the issuance of a life insurance policy- where the company received notice of the beneficiary’s murderous intentions- constituted a tort under Florida law for damages arising from the beneficiary’s attempt to murder the insured in order to collect the benefits.