Description: This article discusses the use of parametric distributions to model health care cost.

Description: An excerpt from a presentation at the 2014 Living to 100 Symposium, this article describes an open-source model for use by actuaries attempting to estimate future health benefit costs, discusses its strengths and limitations, and projects that spending for those age over 65 will take more than $13 trillion by 2055, about 50 percent of total medical expenditures.

Description: Discussion of the separate and joint effects of obesity and diabetes on disability and mortality, and ways these effects can be used to improved insurance pricing and reserving, reverse the increasing rates of obesity and diabetes, and improve current projections of disability and mortality risks.

Description: It is well accepted that, for ages 30 and above, human mortality rates increase with age, yet no established graduation method makes direct use of this knowledge. Such a method is offered in this paper.

Description: An approach to quantify medical intervention savings when medical claims data is not available by leveraging overlapping measurement techniques.

Description: This paper presents simple Bayesian graduation models that substantially ease the prior elicitation burden, and also describes a Monte Carlo integration approach that greatly reduces the computational load.

Description: Discusses the Canadian Institute of Actuaries' disability morbidity study to update the 1964 CDT and explains the techniques used to interpolate incidence rates from the 1964 CDT.

Description: Recognizing an opportunity to help serve its members in this age of increased financial oversight, the Health Section of the Society of Actuaries commissioned a series of guides on the use of statistical techniques specifically geared for the work of health actuaries. In this first guide in the series, the topic is an estimate well-known to health actuaries- the calculation of incurred but not reported [IBNR] health claims reserves. In particular, this guide focuses on the development of confidence intervals around IBNR estimates.

Description: Feature article providing an in-depth look at using genetic algorithms.