Description: Explores the open vs. closed systems debate with regards to actuarial modeling and exposes the over-simplification. Valuable for anyone who uses models.

Description: The guest editorial details some valuable lessons during the author’s career as an employee benefits (mostly retirement) consultant, turned P&C predictive modeling, reporting and data warehousing lead, turned an analytic strategist and independent consultant.

Description: This paper presents an approach to analyzing continuing care retirement community [CCRC] data, and demonstrates the methods using data from a large CCRC. It is assumed that residents make transitions among a number of states that represent the levels of care required by residents. There is randomness associated with both the transition times and the states entered at these times. The model is conveniently characterized in terms of transition intensity functions, which represent the instantaneous rates of transition between pairs of states.

Description: Identifying and submitting all appropriate ICD-9 diagnosis codes to CMS will result in a higher risk score for the member and increased payments to Medicare Advantage plans. Milliman's HCC prevalence study illustrates the significant variations in HCC prevalence rates by age/gender, geography, and population type and will assist plans in benchmarking the effectiveness of their own diagnosis code capture efforts.

Description: Recurrence relations arise naturally in life contingencies for 2 reasons - the aggregate law of mortality, which relates the distribution of the future life times of 2 insureds, if one of them and the other is that most life insurance products can be constructed as a portfolio of 2 basic product types. We use the above simple idea and the extra freedom provided by the fractional age distribution to reveal a structure behind some common recursions. The structure has obvious pedagogical value. More interestingly, a software based on it has been implemented which facilitates actuarial computing.

Description: October 2015 issue of CompAct, the technology section's member benefit newsletter.