Description: Susan Dentzer, editor-in-chief of Health Affairs, discusses health care and health policy.

Description: After three decades of relatively stable overall inflation trends, the United States has seen significant increases over the last twelve months. What could this mean for inflation in the medical sector? Explore past patterns between the two phenomena, and what drivers stakeholders can monitor to be best aware of what could be coming.

Description: Interview with Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change.

Description: The winner's curse, applied to Affordable Care Act plan pricing.

Description: In this interview Dr. Reinhardt shares his thoughts on the role he believes actuaries should take in the health care system reforms.

Description: Shannon Brownlee shares her perspectives on the current health care crisis, including: inconsistent treatment patterns across providers and geographic regions, providers lacking evidence-based guidelines, the need for better independent clinical research to establish those guidelines, and the limits to consumerism's potential to fix the crisis.

Description: The Affordable Act's risk corridor program is a temporary feature that applies to individual and small group QHPs from 2014 through 2016. Designed to protect insurers against pricing uncertainty, the program appears straightforward but has many subtle consequences. In this article, we review the need for risk corridors, the calculation itself, and the implications that result.

Description: One of the Health Section's key focuses in 2019 is Initiative 18/11. Last year the SOA joined forces with the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) to answer the nagging question: “What can we do about the cost of healthcare?” A steering group has been formed to lead a research project as to what managed care companies can do to reduce costs without sacrificing quality. The project [called Managed Care 3.0 in the 18/11 paper] will examine historical models that have worked as well as investigate the impact that new technologies and care models may have on cost and quality, with the goal of better understanding the current environment and identify­ing potential risks and opportunities.