Description: Updates on the efforts of the Academy’s health practice council. its work groups and task forces, to educate health care policymakers on issues including health care reform, Medicare, loss ratios, premium review, reinsurance, benefit and eligibility changes, exchanges, and risk based capital.

Description: Discussion of the impact of the ACA on RBS and required surplus for a health plan

Description: This article is focused on sustainability concerns in the ACA individual markets and what we can learn from core actuarial principles as discussed in ASOPs.

Description: Results of an SOA survey regarding the expectation for 2015 accruals for 3Rs and cost sharing reduction payments

Description: This article discusses the challenges and unknowns relating to the regulatory inclusion of pediatric dental benefits within the essential benefits list of the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Description: This presents the results of a May 2010 survey by the Society of Actuaries SOA asking members of the SOA Health Section for their opinions on ways to bend the cost curve in light of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ACA, the new health reform law passed in March 2010.

Description: This session dealt with Regulatory Considerations in Group Insurance. Topics included: 1. National health insurance. 2. Federal hospital cost control programs. 3. Non-discrimination legislation and regulation. 4. Multiple- employer trusts. 5. Impact of recent OASDI financing changes. 6. Changes in mandatory retirement age on group insurance.

Description: This session explores the far-reaching changes to how clinical data will be sourced, processed and consumed in many payer use cases including risk adjustment, quality measurement, care management, claims adjudication, prior authorizations, and other payer functions. Robust, interoperable data exchange is a prerequisite for value-based care. Clinical data will be increasingly accessible to augment administrative (claims) data via standardized Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR, pronounced 'fire'), at a fraction of the cost of a accessing a traditional medical record and in real-time. On May 1, 2020, HHS issued a final rule implementing interoperability and the patient access provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act of 2016, although enforcement has been delayed into 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The new regulations promote, “HHS’s vision and strategy for achieving a health information ecosystem within which all individuals, their personal representatives, their health care providers, and their payers are able to send, receive, find, and use electronic health information in a manner that is appropriate, secure, timely, and reliable to support the health and wellness of individuals through informed, shared decision-making, as well as to support consumer choice of payers and providers.”Once enforcement begins, CMS and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC), have the authority to mandate adoption of interoperability requirements, and also penalize payers and providers for non-compliance or the delay and withholding of data.This ‘digital transformation’ of the clinical data ecosystem has far-reaching implications for enabling technologies including Natural Language Processing (NLP) and entire segments of services and vendors. It will eliminate many departmental barriers, duplication and error sources for health plans and impact every department and the underlying economics of delivering and managing care.

Description: Remarks on the attitudes underlying the stalling of health care reform legislation.

Description: A proposal to reform current health care market, from a 'preferred payer' system, in which Medicare and Medicaid pay less than the true cost while others must then pay more, to a 'value for money' system. This would be achieved by requiring providers to bill all patients the same rate for the same services, with a standard bundling format to make all providers' rate differences transparent. Differences between billed charges and what Medicare pays would be made up by the Medicare patient, rather than subsidized by those outside of Medicare.