Description: Medical insurance today is more like pre-paid medical payments. Medical insurance should be bought for protection, but rarely used, like auto insurance.

Description: An essay suggesting a health care financing system.

Description: The essay discusses the appropriate role of insurance companies, efficient and economical ways to care for chronic illnesses and having a maximum price society will pay to support the ongoing life of any one individual.

Description: Actuaries should understand the economic considerations involved in the formulary drug decision-making process, and the presence of actuarial input in the process could improve it, especially by tying it to overall decision making for the health plan. From Prescription Drugs Monograph, M-HB04-1.

Description: Increasing uncertainties and volatility in financial as well as real goods markets increasingly reveal that controlling systems based on deterministic and pseudo-exact values are insufficiently eligible to manage the business activities. This raises the question how management systems can be modified to generate the adequate management impulses in volatile periods. Risk management deals from identifying, evaluating and aggregating chances and risks, which again determine the potential fluctuation range of relevant performance indicators. Everyday corporate life shows that risk management is considered important; but the corresponding processes to identify, evaluate and report chances and risks are seldom part of established decision criteria. This “paradox” lets assume that risks are managed in various differing and unsystematic ways. The combination of traditional controlling methods and risk management is not primarily a methodological challenge. The behavior of the whole organization, practiced over a long-year period, has to be transferred into a new corporate culture of transparent dealing with chances and risks. This paper describes the necessary change management process, which has to come along with necessary methodological modifications.

Description: Essay reforming uninsured health care.

Description: Essay reforming healthcare where participants have a vested interest in reaching the best answer.

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

Description: While there are many issues in healthcare, the single most significant issue is cost, both in terms of the cost today and in terms of the growth in cost over the past several decades. We need to increase the ability of all citizens to purchase healthcare services or health insurance that in turn purchases healthcare services, and decrease the growth in the cost of healthcare.

Description: Stress tests and scenarios are often used as an informative tool to help stakeholders understand the risk profile of a firm. These analyses are often informational only and not directly linked to internal decision-making. This paper describes our approach to integrating stress tests into a regular decision-making process as part of our Own Risk and Solvency Assessment (ORSA). We have implemented a framework and analytical process that both enhances management’s understanding of our risk profile and links that to the development of our risk appetite. In this applied paper, we describe the framework and supporting analytics we established to achieve this goal and the practical implications for obtaining buy-in from senior management to establish this as an ongoing process.