Description: Future mortality improvement has been a common assumption in life insurance and annuity pricing and forecasting for many years. However, experience over the last decade suggests this might be an assumption that merits reconsideration in the United States. This article will take a closer look at factors that impact mortality improvement trends and discuss why insurers may want to reevaluate product designs to better manage the associated mortality risk. We then introduce a product idea with this in mind, where premiums are based on a life expectancy index and insurers share the risk (and opportunity) or mortality improvement with policyholders.

Description: Milliman was engaged by the SOA to conduct two Accelerated Underwriting (AU) surveys, one of direct companies and another of reinsurers. The surveys explored actual results from 2019–2021 and expected results from 2022.

Description: This article details different methods for calculating mortality impact associated with new underwriting programs. A common simplified calculation is compared and contrasted with two first principles approaches. The strengths and weaknesses of both approaches are discussed.

Description: This article discusses the concept of Conservation of Mortality ("Conservation"). Conservation is the modeling principle that ensures consistency between assumptions of the total mortality of a population and mortality among population subsets. This article discusses the use cases for Conservation and the many ways that one could implement it in a model or an experience study. This article also discusses the potential issues that arise when using Conservation, and how one might solve or alleviate these issues.

Description: There are certain occasions when the knowledge we have gained in our jobs carries over into our personal lives. For instance, developing insurance products certainly helps when it comes time to buy an insurance policy. Recently, one of the authors had the experience of giving his 91-year-old grandmother, Nanny as she is affectionately called, an Extended Delayed Word Recall DWR test. This article will show that DWR tests are a powerful predictor of mortality in the elderly. As the population ages and more and more life insurance is being applied for at the older ages, having a DWR test in an underwriting arsenal is like comfort food for an actuary.

Description: A discussion of the Society of Actuaries study of Mortality Under Standard Individually Underwritten Life Insurance Between 1995 and 1996 Policy Anniversaries.”

Description: The Mortality Studies Working Group MSWG of the Society of Actuaries was created to review the issue of the frequency of the standard ordinary individual life insurance mortality experience studies and the published reports of those studies. This report discusses these issues and makes recommendations.

Description: A follow-up to the article “Comfort Food for an Actuary: Cognitive Testing in Underwriting the Elderly,” published in the May 2006 edition of Product Matters! This article presents the updated results, based upon three more years of data, of the Delayed Word Recall DWR Test mortality study. mortality study.

Description: This article discusses a recently completed RGA in-depth study that looked at assumptions and experience for lapses and mortality at the end of the level premium period for level term business.