Description: In this paper, Honorable Mention Essay for the Society of Actuaries' Entrepreneurial Actuaries Section 2010 Papers Competition, the author examines the rapidly increasing costs of maintaining the U.S. prison system and the fiscal pressures the federal and state governments are faced with, and proposes a plan for an early prisoner release program “with a rigorous, merit-based approach that can be expected to demonstrate favorable outcomes for the general public and the released prisoner.” This plan involves “an optimized process for evaluating the perils associated with freeing candidates eligible for early release - an individualized assessment and quantification of those risks…” The article goes on to describe the costs, benefits, risks, and critical success factors. The report includes two appendices.

Description: This article, an Honorable Mention Essay for the Society of Actuaries' Entrepreneurial Actuaries Section 2010 Papers Competition, is a discussion of the various issues relating to measurement of data in healthcare. The author presents “a light hearted & tongue-in-cheek take on how healthcare is typically measured, and an entrepreneurial vision for a better world.” Noting that typically data is summarized in deterministic models that produce point estimates for analysis and decision making, the author’s vision presented in the paper “is that of a central repository of actuarially modeled distributions that can either be used as benchmarks or adapted to an organization's experience.”