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: This interview article summarizes the work being done by a Health Section Strategic Initiative Committee.

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

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 article describes how Long-Term Care riders attached to Life Insurance policies provide real insurance value at a reasonable cost and allow life insurance companies to compete on a basis other than cost.

Description: For a long time the primary focus of private LTC insurance companies has been to educate the public about the need for private LTC insurance and to make the product more acceptable to a wider population. To this end there have been numerous changes to the product design to make this product more acceptable to general population. However, one of the things that may have been overlooked in those product design changes is the need for alignment of policyholder and insurance company’s interests, which is to make coverage more affordable and to reduce adverse selection. Incentivizing good behavior from policyholders can not only make LTC insurance policies less expensive but also help policyholders make better health choices, which can help them stay healthy for a longer time. These incentives may also reduce some of the inherent risks in a long term care policy and may help in increasing the sales of private LTC insurance.