Description: Report on meetings sessions in each of 5 tracks for Long Term Care professionals: Actuarial, Compliance, Operations, Policy and Provers, and Group.

Description: Summary of results of a 2010 Health Section survey of actuaries and Medicare population, on ways to bend the cost trend curve downward. Issues included transparency, quality measures, fraud and abuse, provider payment, malpractice, medical errors, consumer education, and the pros and cons of employer-sponsored coverage.

Description: Summary of the National Conference on Group Practice of Medicine, held in Chicago from October 19-21, 1967 to explore means for stimulating the group practice of medicine.

Description: This article describes the pre-HIPAA small group market and identify some of the key changes to this market resulting from HIPAA particularly guaranteed issue and renewal and restriction of pre-existing conditions and.

Description: Summary of pending legislation in response to looming crisis in the Long Term Vare market.

Description: Updates on the efforts of the Academy’s health practice council. its work groups and task forces, to educate health care policymakers on issues including health care reform, Medicare, loss ratios, premium review, reinsurance, benefit and eligibility changes, exchanges, and risk based capital.

Description: Developing a formal strategy to guide the SOA’s activities with respect to public policy-related topics is underway. Recent experience shows that non-partisan contributions through the SOA’s research are already adding value to important public policy discussions.

Description: This study was sponsored by the Society of Actuaries Health Section. This paper explores the relative significance of aging as a determinant of financial cost of health care beyond age 50, with particular attention to the effect for ages 65 and older. The paper presents concepts of aging factors and aging curves, which define relative values between ages for utilization or cost of health care services. General conclusions are drawn from Medicare data that utilization and cost differ by age, but that aging factors vary across services and may be less significant at very old ages. The author then turns to the question of measuring the significance of an aging curve assumption and what accuracy is lost in the simpler alternative of a single value across an age range.

Description: There is a wide range of literature on aging and health care. We sample this literature and find it fits into the subcategories of theoretical aging, medical significance of aging, treatment of the elderly, and resource allocation to the elderly. Themes are that financial arrangements can cause inefficient and ineffective care and that care guidelines need to developed specifically for the elderly rather than extrapolating guidelines for younger patients.

Description: Panelists discuss key aspects of recent and pending laws and the cost and design implications on group health plans. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.