Description: Social Insurance & Public Finance Section council members provide a recap of sessions from the 2021 SOA Health Meeting, with a focus on sessions covering Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA, and public policy. The authors include a description of SIPF Section-sponsored sections, including a session on the ACA and a session on CMS's Direct Contracting Model.

Description: Discussion of state medicaid expansion due to provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

Description: COVID-19 is causing changes to nursing homes that will last beyond the pandemic. Nursing homes serve Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries; so, in the public interest, we should consider how changes to nursing homes might impact these populations.

Description: This article is about the most significant issues and trends that may impact long-term care LTC risks, care delivery and protection in the future.

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: This article summarizes the presentations by the Society of Actuaries and the Academy of Actuaries at the January 2015 National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) Roundtables in Washington DC. SOA presented on the 2014 SOA monograph series "The Link between Retirement Security and Long-Term Care."

Description: This is an article explaining the options employers have under the Medicare Part D, or the Prescription Drug Improvement and Medicare Modernization Act - MMA - that took effect in January 2006. The article discusses 4 options under the MMA with the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Description: Panel discusses the effects of reduced payment levels to many Medicare managed care organizations. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Vol. 24, No. 2.

Description: Republicans have promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act for years. Now that they have power, what will Republican health care reform look like?

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.