Description: A divisive confrontation over health care pricing is almost inevitable over the next few years. What will ultimately happen is a political decision, not an actuarial one—but it will have major consequences for the trend in health care costs and the divergence between public and private insurance premiums.

Description: The aftershocks of the COVID pandemic will pass --- eventually. Government subsidies and spending soared in 2020 to meet the challenges of the pandemic. Health expenditures leapt from 17.6% of GDP to 19.7%, and then dropped to 18.8% in 2021, and will fall again to 18.2% (projected) in 2022, but are expected to return to the long-run trend by 2024 and gradually rise thereafter. However, during the next few years most attention will be paid to dealing with complex aftershocks from the flood of Covid funding in 2020 and 2021, a surge of inflation in 2022, and a looming recession in 2023.

Description: A divisive confrontation over health care pricing is almost inevitable over the next few years. What will ultimately happen is a political decision, not an actuarial one—but it will have major consequences for the trend in health care costs and the divergence between public and private insurance premiums.

Description: The SOA is pleased to make available a report updating the 2012 risk assessment performed by Porteous et al. The report also provided an economic capital analysis for a stylized US plan with the same member profile and the USS provisions modified to reflect a typical US DB plan.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) published its first COVID-19 research brief on March 10, 2020, followed by regular updates and expansions through June 12, 2020. The comprehensive report included a section of statistics that highlight the pandemic’s impact on economies in the U.S. and Canada. This report shows updates through July 29, 2020, to selected graphs from the Economic and Asset Impact section of the comprehensive report.

Description: COVID has washed over healthcare like a tsunami—things have been tossed in all directions. According to Medicare actuaries, trends have been turned upside down in 2021, but will reverse back in 2023 as medical costs rebound. It is more prudent to base projections on long run trends for a period after the storm, extrapolating from 2026 forward, leaving the intervening turbulence (years 2022 -2025) mostly unspecified.

Description: In this Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute report, authored by consultants from Milliman, Inc. (Milliman) we aim to study the effects of hurricanes on human health: whether there is a relationship between hurricanes and the observed prevalence of healthcare utilization or certain health conditions among the affected population, whether this relationship can be observed through a healthcare utilization dataset, and whether there is an interaction between this observation and metrics of socioeconomic vulnerability.

Description: This report has been written to provide a primer on the measurement known as R0 (pronounced “R-naught”), which is commonly used in epidemiology. The R0 metric has received extensive press coverage since the outbreak due to its importance in the measurement of the spread of COVID-19.

Description: In this report, we explore the impact of clustering using the Medical Expenditure Panel Study (MEPS) data for children (aged 5 to 17) to build a bridge between oral health and overall health using dental and medical expenditures. We include social determinants of health as cluster input variables using the Partitioning around Medoids (PAM) method to identify children and their families who could potentially benefit from population health management related to oral health.

Description: This discussion on major medical expense insurance examines the trends in the types of plans sold, popularity of the comprehensive type of medical expense insurance plan, special problems, and dependent coverage. From Transactions of Society of Actuaries 1959, Vol. 11, No. 29 AB.