Description: Essay recommending establishing a consistent and actuarially sound foundation for assessing the costs and benefits of each and every current and new Medicare or other healthcare proposal.

Description: Essay offers a vision of health care where everyone is covered, everyone is eligible, receives fair pricing, receives vital information and is taxed the same.

Description: This is one of eight essays from the collection: 2020 Living to 100 Essays.

Description: The primary motivation of this year’s call for essays was to identify potential solutions and new innovations being developed to assist workers and retirees better prepare for retirement. The current call drew 13 authors who submitted 18 excellent essays. The full essay collection is found in this publication and sets forth ideas that can be further developed or that will spur thinking for new products, planning tools and employee benefit plan strategies.

Description: The roots of the crisis are understood on a simplified basis, by 3 Ls: a Lack of accountability b Leverage and c Liquidity. Historically, people requiring mortgages sought their mortgages from local institutions that would conduct the evaluation and hold the risk. Loan officers of these institutions were accountable for the outcomes of their decisions – defaults were a direct reflection on their judgment. Leverage was a second key factor. Institutions guaranteed mortgages against default. The third L, liquidity, because a problem. When property values eventually evidenced their inevitable fall, defaults occurred at historically high rates.

Description: Political figures and journalists have tended to blame deregulation and greed for the credit crisis. However, we would like to suggest that these were not the primary cause of the credit crisis. The real cause of the crisis was faulty regulation and arrogance. Flawed regulation in the over-reliance on complicated capital models and arrogance in believing that the complex mathematical formula in risk models overcame the limitations on input availability and enabled companies to capture returns that were greater than the cost of capital, have led Wall Street by creating CDOs and similar instruments to repackage risks and take out the systematic excess risk charges as profits, and have also allowed companies to run “prudently” on leverage ratios that were in hindsight over the limit.

Description: This paper discussed providing consumers of medical care with transparent and comparable price and quality information to enable them to make economically optimal decisions.

Description: The traditional informal care of/by family has faced increasing geographic and economic challenges from changing family households and sources of family income. Financial planning and risk protection tools provide important resource in the changing retirement landscape toward optimal family support and crisis management, that is, with less duress and financial burden to affected family caregivers. Ultimately, maintaining family values and close communications through evolving family structures are key to a healthy society and economic welfare of the people.

Description: This essay focuses on some of the practical problems in supporting elderly seniors and carrying out their wishes. It tries to help families avoid disputes.

Description: I propose a Social Security deferral product and two annuity enhancements. Then I address the challenges in getting such products distributed.