Description: The Bermuda International Life and Annuity Conference highlights Bermuda’s enhanced capital and solvency framework, and growing long-term (re)insurance sector.

Description: Retirees and their advisors should construct diversified portfolios of retirement income, allocating among various retirement income classes that include Social Security, annuities, and systematic withdrawals from invested assets. This essay discusses the pros and cons of various retirement income generators and the issues with constructing retirement income portfolios.

Description: For a long time the primary focus of private LTC insurance companies has been to educate the public about the need for private LTC insurance and to make the product more acceptable to a wider population. To this end there have been numerous changes to the product design to make this product more acceptable to general population. However, one of the things that may have been overlooked in those product design changes is the need for alignment of policyholder and insurance company’s interests, which is to make coverage more affordable and to reduce adverse selection. Incentivizing good behavior from policyholders can not only make LTC insurance policies less expensive but also help policyholders make better health choices, which can help them stay healthy for a longer time. These incentives may also reduce some of the inherent risks in a long term care policy and may help in increasing the sales of private LTC insurance.

Description: Summary of the July, 2013 newsletter with an executive overview of each article.

Description: Article focuses on a number of strategies that can be used to improve results in a DC plan. It is based on information from several outside sources. It encourages people with DB backgrounds to learn more about DC issues.

Description: A review of the academic article "Health Insurance for ‘Humans’: Information Frictions, Plan Choice, and Consumer Welfare."

Description: This essay advocates that the transition from DB to DC plans won't be complete until plan sponsors offer programs of retirement income in their DC plans. The essay discusses the relevant actuarial and behavioral issues.

Description: The science of behavioral economics explains shifts in social actions and behaviors. Behavioral economics studies how people actually behave in given circumstances—not what they did in the past or say they might do in the future, but how they are likely to behave now. It examines rational and irrational thought as well as unconscious motivations to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of consumer behavior. Could the insurance industry utilize behavioral economics as a way to potentially increase consumer desire to buy life insurance?

Description: This article describes seven results from behavioral finance that actuaries may find useful: heuristics, the endowment effect, loss aversion, prospect theory, satisficing, strategic thinking and agent-based modeling.

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.