Description: Cell and Gene Therapy (CGT) are life-changing treatments where conditions such as cancer, hemophilia, spinal muscular atrophy and blindness are being cured. These are great for individuals and society, but the treatment costs are expensive which is bad for payers and reinsurers. This article explores ways for health reinsurance actuaries to participate in the space and evaluate the risk associated with these treatments

Description: This paper aims to help financial and insurance practitioners better recognize, assess, and respond to large scale, large impact, rare events (LSLIRE’s) which are occurrences currently often wrongly labeled as being unpredictable black swans. A black swan, as Nassim Taleb defines it in his popular book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House & Penguin (2007-2010 2nd. Ed.) is 1) an outlier event, which 2) carries extreme impact, and 3) “makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact.” Elsewhere, Taleb says it is unpredictable, which is why people concoct explanations. Other people use the term in many and various ways, to enfold events missed by most people because they are rare, missed by computer models and/or experts, and to include events they simply seem personally to have misunderstood. The paper also discusses building better ways to assess such events’ background characteristics, emergence dynamics, logics, and other foreseeable attributes. A secondary focus is educating practitioners to better respond - whether to limit damage or to take advantage of - the opportunities that arise from what others are likely to miss or misjudge during and after the emergence of LSLIRE (AKA black swan) events.

Description: September 2015 Reinsurance News

Description: November 2015 Reinsurance News

Description: Discussion of a Reinsurance Arbitration Survey covering the period 1998–2001 Also a discussion of the shrinking number of life reinsurance companies in the USA

Description: Pricing longevity swap reinsurance transactions consists of a number of different actuarial tasks, each of which hides potential pitfalls. The article outlines the pricing process, which includes a detailed analysis of current mortality experience of the portfolio to be transferred, choice and calibration of an appropriate model for mortality improvement trends and the calculation of a risk margin which reflects the uncertainty associated with the pricing best-estimate, which includes mis-estimation risk, model risk, longevity basis risk and stochastic uncertainty.

Description: The rapid pace of change within the reinsurance sector over the past few years has given way to the permutations of a “new reality” that is being shaped by abundant capacity from traditional and alternative sources.

Description: A recent Society of Actuaries study calculates safety and stability for current Long Term Care Insurance premiums.

Description: Significant consolidation has occurred in the U.S. reinsurance market over the last five years. The number of companies operating in ordinary life reinsurance has continued to decline—13 primary companies excluding retrocessionaires contributing to the Munich American Reassurance Survey in 2004, compared to 20 companies in 1999. Table 1 and Table 2 indicate the change in market share as well as the change in the composition of the leading participants in the U.S. market for 2004 versus 1999.