Description: Shannon Brownlee shares her perspectives on the current health care crisis, including: inconsistent treatment patterns across providers and geographic regions, providers lacking evidence-based guidelines, the need for better independent clinical research to establish those guidelines, and the limits to consumerism's potential to fix the crisis.

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: There is a wide range of literature on aging and health care. We sample this literature and find it fits into the subcategories of theoretical aging, medical significance of aging, treatment of the elderly, and resource allocation to the elderly. Themes are that financial arrangements can cause inefficient and ineffective care and that care guidelines need to developed specifically for the elderly rather than extrapolating guidelines for younger patients.

Description: This article summarizes 2012 AAA activities relating to the Affordable Care Act implementation, including work on the Amicus Brief for the Supreme Court Decision, MLR regulations, Actuarial Value, Rate Review, Essential Health Benefits and work with the NAIC.

Description: Evaluation of Taiwan's National Health insurance program and a discussion of a managed competition model to reform it.

Description: This session is about the Health insurance has become an important issue in this year's presidential election campaign. What effect will this have on the likelihood of major health-care reform, on public expectations about rights to health care, about perceptions of health insurers, etc? From Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 18, No. 4A.

Description: The article describes the sessions that the SIPF section sponsored - Paid Family Leave and Medicare and Medicaid Update. The Paid Family Leave session described what it is and what states it is currently in and how it is being implemented. The Medicare and Medicaid update gave the attendees the most up to date news about what is going on at the Federal level.

Description: This article includes a summary of 2012 Health section activities as well as upcoming events, including the Health '12 Meeting, two HARI research projects (ACOs and risk adjustment), the value of health section membership, and our Canadian Outreach.

Description: This article is a brief overview of what the Health Actuarial Research Initiative, HARI, is and what the participants in HARI will be doing. HARI is a project formed by the Society of Actuaries that will develop actuarial research studying changes in health care systems.

Description: This session is about regulatory constraints and the role the NAIC is playing to help facilitate 24-hour programs, plan design issues, the use of managed care, coverage as part of a workers' compensation plan versus coverage of health care outside of the workers' compensation system. From Record of Society of Actuaries Vol. 18, No. 4A.