Description: Overview of public health (responsibilities, funding, challenges) and discussion of the role actuaries can play in achieving population health goals.

Description: This article contains a condensed summary and excerpt from the fourth white paper in the Commercial Health Care: What’s Next? series.

Description: Stakeholders in a specific state (Minnesota) were interviewed about the potential value -- and obstacles -- of a catastrophic backstop program to handle long term care (LTC) financing needs. The design would entail a payroll deduction which would produce a fund to pay LTC expenses once a deductible period (of 1 to 4 years, depending on income) was reached. This design was believed to encourage enrollees to cover the front end better than done today, whether by private insurance or other means.

Description: Article on the history of the Long Term Care Discussion Group, a Washington DC-based venue for discussing long-term care and related issues for over 20 years.

Description: An overview of health care history and privatization developments in four Latin American countries: Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil.

Description: This article discusses what actuaries see as ideal components of a health care reform package with an emphasis on cost control, efficiency, elimination of fraud and reduction of errors.

Description: Discussion of the implications of a newly adopted NAIC Long-Term Care Insurance Model Regulation provision, which requires benefit trigger decisions to be subject to review by an independent third party, after the insured has exhausted all avenues of internal appeal.

Description: Family members who care for people with dementia need a wide range of support services to help them do the important work of care giving at home.

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.

Description: This article summarizes the presentations by the Society of Actuaries and the Academy of Actuaries at the January 2015 National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) Roundtables in Washington DC. SOA presented on the 2014 SOA monograph series "The Link between Retirement Security and Long-Term Care."