Description: In this session, we will explore recent industry-wide studies focusing on mortality and policyholder behavior patterns across both Life and LTC lines of business. The Life study analyzes extensive data collected over 2018-2022, providing a unique perspective on trends heading into, during, and emerging from the pandemic. The study covers 2.5 million deaths and over 5 million voluntary surrenders and fund lapses across term and permanent life products. The LTC analysis will focus on the components of policyholder termination, with an additional perspective of total termination patterns prior to, during and post-pandemic periods. The analysis will examine cohorts of policyholders to identify the area of largest deviations from expectation and how that translated into short term results as well as where we are today. The aggregation of experience across participating companies provides insights into areas where a particular insurer’s data is not credible on its own, including: older ages, preferred/standard classes and more. At the conclusion, attendees will have an understanding of how experience emerged and considerations for setting assumptions going forward.

Description: A summary of the recent SOA Product Development Section webinar, Challenging the Status Quo: Emerging LTC Product Designs. Summarizes discussions on how the LTC industry can overcome existing hurdles and evolve to meet consumer needs.

Description: Informal caregiving is a major source of long-term care (LTC) and long-term supports and services (LTSS) more broadly. The benefit of informal caregiving is appreciated by those receiving it, and most caregivers find purpose in their work. The costs of caregiving fall on employers, other family members, the health care service sector, stakeholders in the LTSS system, and most importantly the caregivers themselves. Providing support to these caregivers can therefore benefit employers, employees, and their families, as well as the many payors of formal LTSS. Hear from three experts in caregiving who will provide their perspective about how to support information caregivers — operationally and financially — to help them succeed in their purpose. Understand benefits this support can have to the other stakeholders in today’s LTSS system. By attending this session, you will be able to: • Explain the importance of informal caregivers to stakeholders in the LTSS system, including the impact to payors and employers. • Describe the challenges informal caregivers face, and paths to success and avoiding burnout. • Discuss potential future financial solutions that may benefit caregivers, including employee programs and insurance opportunities.

Description: According to Oliver Wyman's 2023 Asset-Liability Management (ALM) survey, long-term care (LTC), universal life, and whole life insurance products have among the longest liability duration profiles, often with material asset-liability duration mismatches. Deploying an optimal strategic asset allocation (SAA) framework for these products is particularly challenging due to their: - Long-tail profile. Liability cashflows for long-duration insurance products often extend beyond the investment horizon of currently available assets (e.g., 30-year U.S. Treasuries) - Liquidity needs. Depending on the type and age of the insurance product, achieving your desired levels of projected liquidity becomes instrumental Solution: A robust liability-driven SAA framework with an emphasis on minimizing cashflow mismatch while considering a company's risk appetite and investment guidelines aims to reduce interest rate and liquidity risks. Case studies: LTC and life-focused case studies will provide insights into hypothetical SAA frameworks, including ways companies optimize their fixed-income assets. We will also explore techniques used to extend asset duration beyond a typical fixed-income portfolio, using derivatives and alternative assets.

Description: This article will highlight new model visualization approaches we use to shed light on the “black-box” nature of advanced modeling techniques. These visualizations help us better highlight and understand the key drivers of predictions so that they can be understood and validated by all stakeholders

Description: Congress authorized the creation of the RAISE Family Caregiving Advisory Council in 2018. The Council, comprised of family caregivers and experts from a wide variety of stakeholder organizations in both the private and public sector, have been engaged in an in-depth research effort over the last two years to develop recommendations and an implementation plan to address our national caregiving crisis. This article describes their work and the newly released Report to Congress.

Description: Come and learn about one of the long-term care (LTC) industry's hottest trends: Wellness programs. Discover key insights from Oliver Wyman's 2022 and 2023 industry surveys on LTC wellness programs, focusing on the evolution and expansion of wellness programs over the last few years. In addition, listen in as a panel of industry representatives share their perspectives on challenges faced, lessons learned and next steps in their wellness journey. Gain impactful insights and takeaways from our panel of experts (with wide-ranging familiarity of LTC and wellness programs), who will pull from their first-hand knowledge.

Description: Mortality Model Selection and Combination in RAlternative approaches for selecting mortality models and forecasting mortality have been proposed. The usual practice is to base mortality forecasts on a single mortality model selected using in-sample goodness-of-fit measures. However, cross-validation and other alternative out-of-sample measures are increasingly being used in model selection, and model combination methods are becoming a common alternative to using a single mortality model. Such methods combine predictions from multiple mortality models to reduce model choice uncertainty and improve forecast accuracy. Explore techniques to select and combine mortality models using the freely available open source R package CoMoMo (https://github.com/kessysalvatory/CoMoMo), which extends the widely used R package StMoMo (https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=StMoMo). We will use data for the USA and other countries to discuss and demonstrate four different model combination approaches including simple model averaging, Bayesian model averaging, model confidence set, and stacked regression ensembles.

Description: "Living to 100 in the time of COVID-19: A Study of Late –Life Mortality Trajectories, Leonid A. Gavrilov, Ph.D., Natalia S. Gavrilova, Ph.D., Academic Research Centers, NORC at the University of Chicago Swedish Mortality Does Not Decelerate in Recent Cohorts, or Does it? – Roland Rau, Ph. D., Professor, University of Rostock & Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany; Marcus Ebeling, Ph.D., Karin Modig, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Anders Ahlbom, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm Sweden; Kai Kaufhold, Aktuar DAV, Ad Res Advanced Reinsurance Services GmbH, Cologne, Germany; Annika Ziegler, Lukas Stake, Hochschule Koblenz & Ad Res, Germany"

Description: With current trends in aging and life expectancy, long-term care needs represent a significant burden for many families. This burden falls unevenly based on several factors and inherent challenges. Hear a presentation of two recent Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute reports: One that looked at disparities in the need for long-term services and support by race and ethnicity, among other factors, and another that reviews the cost and burden of informal caregiving. These reports, sponsored by the SOA Research Institute's Aging and Retirement and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Strategic Research Programs represent the latest thinking in this area. Come learn the results of these efforts and take advantage of the opportunity to help shape further work in this area.