Description: Today, a plethora of tools and approaches exist to develop lifetime projections of long-term care (LTC) business. Within these tools lie two distinct approaches to project mortality; namely, by using assumptions that are applied: (1) to an all-lives exposure base, or (2) separately for disabled- versus active-lives exposure bases. Using disabled versus active mortality allows for more granular modeling of the two different cohorts that exhibit dramatically different mortality. And so, when using an all-lives mortality assumption, is the projection missing important details about the appropriate mortality level? This article seeks to not only answer this question, but also answer how a “traditional” all-lives mortality assumption can be impacted when you introduce a combination of the two modeling techniques into the development of a mortality assumption. To answer these questions, we examined the experience and results developed from one c ompany as an illustrative case study.

Description: Discussion of how to measure actual to expected mortality experience in the life settlement market.

Description: The article explores the possibility of using the emerging technology for life insurers to build a monitor system for better risk and profitability management.

Description: On October 30, 2015, the SOA Assumption Development and Governance Group, an informal discussion group consisting of nearly 200 interested actuaries with topics pertaining to actuarial assumption development and governance, organized an industry discussion call on end-to-end assumption documentation practices. The purpose of this call was to generate a large list of ideas for best-practice assumption documentation. More than thirty companies were represented in the call, including direct insurers, reinsurers and consulting firms. This article is the work product of the discussion written by Laurie Li and Alex Zaidlin.

Description: This article presents the findings by a University of Goettingen scientist who indicates that persons with type-O blood are 60% more likely to live to age 75 than are those with type A. This article discusses the impact of this finding on underwriting.

Description: Discussion the issues/difficulties associated with setting mortality assumptions for the later durations of life insurance illustrations. Because some UL products incorporate low cost of insurance charges in late durations as part of the current scale in the product design, some conclude that mortality improvement assumptions are being employed in the disciplined current scale, in violation of the Model Illustrations Regulation.

Description: The impact of the underlying mortality table selected as a basis for projecting mortality results

Description: A discussion of the need to search for alternative mortality tables other than the 1975- 80 and 1990-95 tables to use as the base table, which may be more appropriate for a particular company or specific products.

Description: Second article in a series on how to use predictive analytics to improve the development of long-term care projection assumptions.

Description: View the complete issue for the August 2014 Reinsurance News newsletter.