Description: Discussion of direct primary care and how it helps with several challenges in health care today. DPC improves care coordination, improves outcomes, improves doctor and patient satisfaction, and reduces spending. DPC successes promote the view that primary care should not be covered by insurance; rather, it should be paid for directly.

Description: This article discusses techniques used to create risk scores to help determine appropriate primary care panel sizes for a provider organization.

Description: Discussion of ways direct marketers have beaten recessions in the recent past and suggestions for beating this recession.

Description: This article is about how actuarial services can be applied to life care retirement communities.

Description: This article summarizes key findings from an SOA research report conducted by Milliman on a wide range of living benefit riders with medically related triggers on life and annuity products. The SOA report includes a survey of direct writers, and interviews with many reinsurers. The article focuses on chronic illness accelerated benefit riders, long term care accelerated benefit riders, and the more comprehensive long term care linked benefit products that can pay out benefits that may be much higher than the underlying base plan values. Information on regulations governing these plans, mechanics of the products, sales, and pricing structures is included The intent is to enable the reader to appreciate the issues and opportunities related to these new, innovative designs that help address a range of consumer needs..

Description: Long Term Care Think Tank: Exploring the possibilities for helping the American public manage the financial burden of long term care. This report shares the output of a 1.5 day structured brainstorming session involving some of the LTC industry’s preeminent thought leaders. Ideas presented here are intended to help transform the delivery, accessibility, and financing of long term care.

Description: Disability insurers are showing an increasing interest in benefits that tie closely to long-term care. Several insurers have developed disability products that offer additional disability benefits based on the loss of activities of daily living, while others offer options to convert disability policies into long-term care policies. From Record of Society of Actuaries, Vol. 30, No. 1.

Description: CHCS is a nonprofit policy center focused on improving American health outcomes, particularly for low-income people, including payment & delivery system reform.

Description: This session covers the economic principles of “buffet pricing” and whether such pricing can be used for health care. Presented is an argument in favor of “all you can eat” pricing of health care where consumers pay a fixed fee and have no constraints on consumption. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 27, No. 1, Session 118

Description: This article contains excerpts from the first three articles that were released through the strategic initiative - Commercial Health Care: What’s Next?