Description: Panel discussion, by a physician and an actuary, about the historical forces behind various trends in organ transplant experience data.

Description: The article presents a number of approaches to communicating and discussing risk with employer and retirement board members.

Description: Overview of Medicare's 1979 financial projections under optimistic, pessimistic, and intermediate assumptions, for the Hospital Insurance and Supplementary Medical Insurance programs.

Description: From the 1986 Valuation Actuary Symposium, held in Washington DC in October 1986 Examination of real life case studies of recent insurance company insolvencies to test whether the concept of the Valuation Actuary would have prevented insolvencies or reduced the losses resulting from insolvencies.

Description: Article focusing on the current and future state of health insurance in the U.S.

Description: A review of the 2009 Health Spring Meeting, which included speakers & sessions on the future of the SOA, U.S. health care reform, claims data issues & improvements, predictive modeling, underwriting principles, employer stoploss, cost trends, LTD & disability, and mental health parity regulations.

Description: The article discusses the sustainability of the ACA individual market from a public entitlement standpoint. A key point of measuring sustainability is the reliance on market forces rather than federal budget constraints. The article explains why an actuarial viewpoint of sustainability is necessary to a greater extent than other public assistance and social insurance programs. The article challenges actuaries to be a bold, objective voice in a space that is full of opinionated but often uninformed viewpoints.

Description: People naturally observe risk in the form of the range of experienced gains and losses which is usually represented in statistical terms by standard deviation. In most cases, there are not enough observed values to reliably discern the true amount of losses that are possible in extreme situations. Statistical techniques that have long been applied to insurance company risks are being used to extrapolate from observed risk to extreme tails of the distribution of gains and losses. These processes are essentially an extrapolation from the “known” risk of volatility near the mean to “unknown” risk of extreme losses. “Fat tails” is a term often applied to risks where the likely losses in rare situations significantly exceeds the predictions of a Gaussian (“thin tailed”) distribution. This paper will look at the relationship between the observed risk and the extreme risk in statistical insurance r isk models and discuss how we might create a discussion among model users about the appropriateness of that relationship for specific types of risks.

Description: Article discussing how U.S. insurance company financial reporting will undergo an unprecedented level of change within the next several years, including a convergence of US GAAP with international accounting standards. Communication to the public issues are emphasized