Description: Rising drug—and, to a lesser extent, health care—costs in Canada are creating long-term challenges for not only governments and employers across Canada but for individuals as well, with no easy answers.

Description: Discussion of the recent promulgation of the mega rule interpreting HIPAA and GINA and the potential impact of the mega rule on long-term care insurers' use of genetic information in underwriting coverage.

Description: Panel discusses the effects of reduced payment levels to many Medicare managed care organizations. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.

Description: The adoption of FAS 158 forces sponsors of post-employment health benefit plans to consider how to manage the volatility that changes in medical care inflation create in the other postemployment benefits (OPEB) liability. By choosing carefully how the nominal discount rate used for the liability is decomposed into real rates and inflation, I illustrate that the true exposure to an OPEB plan is to the spread of medical care inflation above (or below) the overall inflation rate. The implication is that an effective immunization strategy exists that can eliminate most of the volatility in the OPEB account.

Description: Discussion of the separate and joint effects of obesity and diabetes on disability and mortality, and ways these effects can be used to improved insurance pricing and reserving, reverse the increasing rates of obesity and diabetes, and improve current projections of disability and mortality risks.

Description: This paper employs a static-component projection methodology as a first step in a more complex research agenda focusing on developing detailed population projections in which mortality, disability, and disease are represented as linked phenomena with changes in any one impacting the other two. From Retirement Needs Framework, M-RS00-1.

Description: Long-Term Care Insurance Coverage: Educating Clients and Evaluating Its Merits as an Investment An Actuary’s Solution to the Consumer’s Dilemma by William A. Dreher from Long-Term Care Newsletter, December 2004, Issue No. 13.

Description: Most health care delivered in the United States is based on the acute care model: it is episodic has a beginning, middle and end usually the patient recovers and interventions are designed to target a specific pathophysiologic abnormality. Chronic disease care, in contrast, often has no clear beginning and no end the focus is on managing over the long term with prevention of progression and complications. Further, many chronic diseases “travel together” comorbidities: for example, diabetes, hypertension, coronary artery disease CAD, heart failure, cerebrovascular disease, peripheral arterial disease and renal dysfunction are often found together.

Description: The primary purpose of this paper is to present some current company practices with respect to term insurance, and the respective cash value requirements imposed by the state insurance departments. Submitted papers from several authors discussing the report followed.

Description: Performance measurement is not the primary purpose of either GAAP or statutory accounting. This article discusses alternative methods of reporting used by life insurance companies to better measure financial performance.