Description: Summary of results of a 2010 Health Section survey of actuaries and Medicare population, on ways to bend the cost trend curve downward. Issues included transparency, quality measures, fraud and abuse, provider payment, malpractice, medical errors, consumer education, and the pros and cons of employer-sponsored coverage.

Description: Complete issue of the January 2013 Health Watch newsletter.

Description: Identifying and submitting all appropriate ICD-9 diagnosis codes to CMS will result in a higher risk score for the member and increased payments to Medicare Advantage plans. Milliman's HCC prevalence study illustrates the significant variations in HCC prevalence rates by age/gender, geography, and population type and will assist plans in benchmarking the effectiveness of their own diagnosis code capture efforts.

Description: Susan Dentzer, editor-in-chief of Health Affairs, discusses health care and health policy.

Description: The article is a case study of various actuarial concepts invovled in the design and implementtion of the AQC - a global budget provider payment arrangement implemented by Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA.

Description: The entire issue of Health Watch.

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

Description: This article gives an overview of the recent SOA research report on the usefulness of Health Economics and Outcomes Research field in an actuarial context. A description of the structured assessment tool for evaluating new technologies is included.

Description: Chairperson's corner October 2014 Health Watch

Description: When setting reserves, multiple methods are often used in the creation of the reserve estimate. Judgment is warranted to combine these different estimates into a final recommendation. This paper describes two techniques that can be used to combine these estimates that may result in better accuracy and lower variance.