Description: Essay stating accessibility, affordability and efficiency are the key to success in the future of healthcare.

Description: This article makes organizations entering the MA market aware of the star rating climate, as well as short- and long-term star rating & revenue considerations.

Description: Essay suggesting to fix the tax code, reform healthcare regulations, open the industry to competition and reform malpractice litigation.

Description: Beneficiaries who are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid often have complex health needs. The two programs have not typically been well integrated and care can become uncoordinated, fragmented and incomplete. The ACA includes provisions to address the shortcomings.

Description: Changes introduced by various Medicare Alternative Payment Models and the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA) have accelerated an existing market trend of shifting some of what has traditionally been considered “insurance risk” to providers. The Provider Risk Sharing Boot Camp will give attendees deeper insights into methods, current thinking, and alternative solutions that actuaries can use to help providers understand and manage the financial and actuarial risks that they are taking, many for the first time.

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: A summary of Medicare reform and its effect on prescription drug coverage.

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.