Description: A humorous look at the spring 2013 activities that a health care actuary working on individual or small group health care reform would be involved in.

Description: This article outlines what the author learned from the Sixth Annual Quality Colloquium at Harvard. From Health Watch, January 2008, Issue No. 57.

Description: Considerations in the applications of Predictive Modeling for health care management. Issue No. 47.

Description: Since health care reform has made accountable care organizations a hot topic, an SOA workgroup is addressing relevant questions, including provider risk under various ACO models, limitations of the Medicare model for motivating change in the health care delivery system, strategic priorities, attribution of members, meaurement, and the roles actuaries can play.

Description: A proposal to address provider payment issues by gradually moving to accountable care organizations. Capitations would be risk-adjusted, non-capitated costs would be covered by hospitalization fund and stoploss, incentives for quality & effective preventive care would be tied to the amount remaining in the fund, and government involvement would be through incentives rather than mandate.

Description: This article contains a condensed summary and excerpt from the fourth white paper in the Commercial Health Care: What’s Next? series.

Description: Why health care inflation exceeds the Consumer Price Index CPI due to tax implications. Issue No. 37.

Description: How benchmarking actual performance to a published source is a useful tool in assessing the value added by a particular program or MCO, Issue No. 38.

Description: This article describes Medicare Supplement and short-term care products in more detail, and we compare their risk profiles. We explore the concept that these two products—when offered together—may provide a complementary hedge of certain policyholder behavior risks.

Description: Review of a research project, co-sponsored by the SOA, which examined 83 organizations and over 150 programs that measure the quality and efficiency of hospitals and physicians.