Description: An economic analysis of bariatric surgery and health care costs supports the case for health plans to cover these procedures.

Description: This article defines LTC insurance and looks at the advantages large employers have to gain from group LTC. From Long-Term Care News, March 2006, Issue No. 17.

Description: Overview of reinsurance: its purpose and uses, its different forms, and the tax results and issues that can arise in reinsurance transactions.

Description: Recently, the SCAN Foundation, AARP, LeadingAge, and HHS funded economic modeling conducted by Milliman and the Urban Institute around LTC reform elements. The LTC industry has over the years also generated ideas to address the on-coming expansion of LTC needs in the U.S. For this article, we have brought together three individuals who have long involvement with LTC financing to discuss some of the recent ideas and provide some perspectives on their pluses and minuses.

Description: Provides a brief review of World Population: An Analysis of Vital Data by N. Keyfitz and W. Flieger. It presented a collection of life tables and related data covering more than 60 populations over 180 years. This book presents data on mortality from recorded causes of death in 180 populations, with detail provided on age and sex .... This volume should reduce substantially problems of data availability by providing information on mortality experience spanning a period of 103 years, for 48 nations, and encompassing a range of life expectancies from 27 to 77. The data will assist the social scientist in documenting such matters as the sources of the vital revolution, causes of increasing sex mortality differentials, components of age curves of mortality, geographic and temporal variations in mortality structure, and economic and social costs of a disease.

Description: Discussion of the separate and joint effects of obesity and diabetes on disability and mortality, and ways these effects can be used to improved insurance pricing and reserving, reverse the increasing rates of obesity and diabetes, and improve current projections of disability and mortality risks.

Description: The article is Part 1 of two articles that provide a case study for the development of a profitability and risk dashboard. The sample dashboard provides distilled information regarding actual to expected (A/E) ratios for key risks, agent quality scores and customer value scores. The dashboard would also provide the value of new business written, surplus strain, debit balances, and expected losses on debit balances at different levels, down to the agent level. A product mix index is provided, together with visual comparisons of key metrics to the company's business plan. The Part 2 article will add information to the dashboard regarding risk margins, target capital, and company value.

Description: Updates on the efforts of the Academy’s health practice council. its work groups and task forces, to educate health care policymakers on issues including health care reform, Medicare, loss ratios, premium review, reinsurance, benefit and eligibility changes, exchanges, and risk based capital.

Description: This article is based on a third party administrator study and explores the relationships between family structure, spare capacity and health care utilization.