Description: Mental health spending has reached $147 billion in the United States with demand only increasing greatly impacting society as nearly 1 in 5 experience these issues. There are even more indirect costs associated with mental health causing a national crisis surpassing 1 percent of the GDP. These costs coupled with the severe lack of licensed clinicians calls for an innovative solution. Through years of development and completion of a randomized controlled trial, Prevail has built and validated a low-cost, scalable solution. Prevail's clinically proven digital mental health treatment provides increased access to care while reducing overall health costs. Private and public payors should being reimbursing this model and offering it to their members.

Description: Traditional pension mathematics assumes that mortality rates are fixed at a valuation date. If mortality rates reduce after a valuation date, the liabilities of a defined benefit plans 'DB plans' increase, leading to deficits. Such deficits are somewhat unpredictable, because the evolution of mortality rates is a random process. This problem, which is often called longevity risk, makes the maintenance of DB plans difficult. The International Accounting Standards Board 'IASB' has plans to tackle the arduous problem of how to disclose longevity risk on financial statements. The IASB was established in 2001 to create universal accounting standards, called International Accounting Reporting Standards 'IFRSs'. A primary objective of this paper is to propose a number of methods that can help actuaries and plan sponsors quantify and disclose longevity risk.

Description: Improving access to health care throughout life by requiring a minimum mandatory paid-up period MMPP. Issue No. 35.

Description: The article considers how actuaries have responded to long term changes in the past and considers how to deal with two changes ion the future: pension provision when bond yields are low and long term care.

Description: New options for worksite LTC planning.

Description: In this session, participants learn the issues large employers face with respect to increased health care costs, the goals and objectives of the value-based purchasing initiative and similar initiatives and the different methods used to implement these initiatives. The Leapfrog Group, a hospital performance initiative, and Bridges to Excellence, a physician performance initiative, are specifically discussed. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 30, No. 1, Session 31

Description: This article is a submission to a Leadership Inspiration contest.

Description: Health Watch, Issue 79, December 2015, Health Watch

Description: Recently researchers, practitioners, and regulators had intense debates about how to treat the data collection threshold in operational risk modeling. There are several approaches under consideration—the empirical approach, the “naive” approach, the shifted approach, and the truncated approach—for fitting the loss severity distribution. Since each approach is based on a different set of assumptions, different probability models emerge. Thus, model uncertainty arises. When possible we investigate such model uncertainty analytically, otherwise we use Monte Carlo simulations. For specific parametric examples we consider exponential and Lomax distributions which are special cases of the generalized Pareto family. Our primary goal is to quantify the effect of model uncertainty on risk measurements. This is accomplished by evaluating the probability of each approach producing conservative capital allocations based on the value-at-risk measure. These explorations are further illustrated using a real data set for legal losses in a business unit (Cruz, 2002).