Description: Presented at May 2000 Spring Meeting. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 dramatically changes the competitive landscape for Medicare products by establishing the Medicare+Choice program. This session recaps the Balanced Budget Act's impact on payment rates for capitated plans and the effects that the changes have made on benefit design and enrollment trends in certain geographical areas.

Description: Presented at October 2000 Annual Meeting. Discusses recent enrollment and cost trends and competitive dynamics with Medicare+Choice capitated plans. Expected future trends are also discussed.

Description: Presented at October 2000 Annual Meeting. The panel presents the status of recent legislative proposals and current election debates, and then focuses more attention on the potential longer-term directions for the health-care system.

Description: Risk adjusters were first used for the Y2K reimbursements to Medicare+Choice laws. How did plans fare? What was the financial impact to the Medicare program? What changes are expected for the future? From Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 26, No. 1. From Record of Society of Actuaries, Volume 26, No. 1: Las Vegas Spring Meeting, May 22-24, 2000, Session 125PD.

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: This paper discusses the quality of healthcare verses the price of healthcare and puruses individuals and doctors making decisions for their own healthcare costs and services.

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: The editors of Health Watch have made health care reform the focus of the Sepctember 2009 issue, and provide an introduction to the issue's contents.

Description: Updates on the efforts of the Academy’s health practice council. its work groups and task forces, to educate and influence health care policymakers on issues including principles for health care reform, Medicare, wellness programs, and solvency.

Description: Changes in CMS requirements for 2011 Medicare Part D plans aimed at reducing confusion surrounding the PDP selection process by making plan differences more visible to seniors. Carriers have responded by making the most significant changes in plan offerings since the program's inception, which is expected to result in membership shifts.