Description: This report presents the results of the Survey on Business Decision practices of reinsurers conducted by the Society of Actuaries Committee on Life Insurance Mortality and Underwriting Surveys . A survey of direct writers of life insurance is reported separately.

Description: The Society of Actuaries Health Benefit Systems Practice Advancement Committee sponsored this review of recent academic literature on the US healthcare system covering quality, access, costs

Description: This is an excel spreadsheet showing Appendix F, Relative Risk, of the 2008 Valuation Basic Table Report and Tables. The full report describes the development of the 2008 Valuation Basic Tables. It incorporates the Primary Tables, the Relative Risk Tables, and the Limited Underwriting tables. Please see the SOA website experience studies for the full report and all other related tables.

Description: This report utilizes a literature review, company survey, company interviews and/or other methods to catalog a listing of common living benefit riders. It was sponsored by the Product Development and Reinsurance Sections along with the Committee on Life Insurance Research. This paper has several goals in relation to each living benefit rider type: to define various living benefit riders, to provide historical sales data and general filing requirements, to explore how underwriting and administration is handled, and to comment briefly on the overall level of claims activity experienced thus far compared to pricing expectations. In addition, it includes a review of the direct and reinsurance pricing implications of the riders to the extent they impact policyholder optionality and base plan financial characteristics. This paper includes perspectives developed through the experience of the authors, and includes executive summaries of a survey conducted by the SOA and Milliman of 34 direct writers, and interviews that Milliman conducted with 8 reinsurers.

Description: A review of the e-book, "Universal Coverage of Long-Term Care in the United States: Can We Get There from Here?"

Description: The implications of the new long-term care law for individuals, employers, insurers and providers, and the federal government.

Description: This section contains book reviews and summaries of recently published works on subjects including demography, savings in the U.S., life company state examinations, private pensions, Industrial insurance, medical care, and union welfare plans.

Description: A research report describing aspects of provider network performance in health care settings with particular focus on experiences with Exchanges.

Description: This research report examines functional and cognitive trends among assisted living facility residents using a sample of long-term care policyholders who are making claims on their policies.

Description: This study aims to answer the question of how much of an episode’s cost and use of specific services can be attributed to the patient’s own health status, as opposed to being driven by other factors such as the care setting, patient preference, and provider practice patterns. In other words, do episode costs vary so widely because of patient characteristics, including health status, or are they related to other, nonclinical factors?