Description: Synopsis of the report of the SOA Medical Effectiveness Task Force, which discusses the concept of health plan performance measurement and the contribution actuaries can make to this.

Description: The Behavioral Finance subgroup of the Health Section will be publishing a series of literature reviews in Health Watch. This is the first review of three in the series. The reviewed article describes an attempt to place an econometric value on consumers’ preferences between broad and narrow networks.

Description: This paper proposes a new method to price the longevity risk premia in order to tackle the pricing obstacle. Based on the equivalent utility pricing principle, our method obtains the minimum risk premium required by the longevity insurance seller and the maximum acceptable risk premium by the longevity insurance buyer.

Description: List of Tables. From A Comparative Analysis of Methods of Health Risk Assessment, M-HB96-1.

Description: This discussion on overinsurance focuses on speculative buying of life, AD&D, and disability insurance, the effect of expanded disability provisions in the Social Security Act on underwriting disability benefits, and the avoidance of overinsurance in medical benefits.

Description: This article compares three potential approaches to determining new coefficients for health-based risk scoring models: full recalibration, p-value credibility weighting, and penalized ridge regression.

Description: This article describes methodologies for detection and deterrence of Medicare fraud. It also describes the validation of PRIDIT for fraud detection in Medicare.

Description: Relative to group medical plans, discusses: recognition given to effect on morbidity of various demographic factors, consideration given to inflation in making rate guarantees, consideration given to group size, and underwriting transfer cases.

Description: Discusses cost-benefit decision-making for acquiring electronic data-processing equipment and installation issues, ability of small companies to compete in pension trust arena, effectiveness of various agency compensation programs in stimulating sales and improving persistency, success of sales to substandard risks and rating methods, and pricing, reinsurance and experience with individual hospital and medical policies.