Description: On March 6, 2023, The Wall Street Journal hosted its Health Forum, a hybrid all-day event. The virtual meeting featured 11 different events. This white paper focuses on those events. The sessions were informative and fast-paced, with each one providing a quick hit of relevant and cutting-edge information around health care.

Description: Early in his career, Ehren Nagel, FSA, MAAA, scoured through podcasts and articles about predictive analytics, long suspecting this was a field with potential for him.

Description: The Society of Actuaries has developed and released a health care forecast model to illustrate the potential impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on insurance plan health care costs in the United States. Users of the model may include insurance company actuaries seeking an additional reference point for 2021 cost development, regulatory actuaries seeking additional insights and validation of costs as part of rating submissions for 2021, and insurance purchasers seeking a deeper understanding of the forces driving 2021 health care costs and premiums. The model is not intended as a replacement for existing modeling tools developed by insurers or regulators. Rather, the model’s primary purpose is to illustrate the key outbreak-related forces that are affecting the trajectory of health care costs. In addition the model can provide a common reference point to facilitate dialogue with respect to the regulatory review of 2021 health insurance rate filings.

Description: The purpose of this document is to inform the user of the 2021 Health Care Cost Model about the sources of data, other reports, and assumptions which were used to populate this report and drive some of the key considerations.

Description: Through the sponsorship of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Society of Actuaries partnered with Wakely to use their health care data to study the effects of COVID-19 on overall health care claims for individuals with a COVID-19 diagnosis. The conclusion of the study is that individuals with COVID-19 claims had significant increases in health care costs leading up to their months of diagnosis, as well as in the months following their diagnosis. These effects were more pronounced for individuals who were hospitalized due to COVID-19 as well as for individuals with prior co-morbidities. Finally, the overall health care costs of these members plateaued at significantly higher levels than their pre-COVID baselines. In fact, all the main membership cohorts experienced claim levels that were at least 20% higher than their pre-COVID starting points.

Description: Yi-Ling Lin, FSA, MAAA, FCA, started the SOA’s Predictive Analytics Certificate Program to keep pace with the impact big data and predictive modeling is having on the health care industry