Description: Article on the history of the Long Term Care Discussion Group, a Washington DC-based venue for discussing long-term care and related issues for over 20 years.

Description: Profile of the Health Section.

Description: Health care reform will require health insurers to change the way they make decisions on what to sell while remaining financially sound. The new regulatory reality of expanded access to coverage leaves insurers with fewer options for managing costs and business risk. With the introduction of risk adjustment mechanisms in the exchanges, the most profitable members will not necessarily be the lowest cost ones, but rather, the members which the health plan is relatively more effective at servicing. While Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 'PPACA' prohibits underwriting and using any health status information for denying coverage or varying the premium rates, this article describes how the use of consumer data will affect the way health insurers make decisions on what products to sell.

Description: There has been a proliferation of proposals to expand access to public health insurance plans, either to strengthen insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or to replace the ACA marketplaces or other health insurance programs altogether. These proposals range from creating a public plan that would operate alongside private plans in the ACA marketplaces, to allowing individuals to buy into Medicare or Medicaid, to expanding Medicare to all. The terms used to describe these various options are often used interchangeably but they would be structured differently and have different impacts depending on the implementation details. Panelists at this session will discuss the general approaches for expanding access to public plans and their potential implications.

Description: A panel of practicing actuaries and policy analysts will discuss the 'big issues' that could affect the actuarial profession in the future, and suggest ideas on how the actuarial profession could adapt to these challenges. This will be an interactive session where attendees can expect to have an opportunity to weigh in through polling questions and discussion. Topics touched will include: socialized medicine, artificial intelligence, the competition from data scientists, data commoditization, disruption from new entrants into the healthcare insurance space, and more.

Description: Transcript of the Q&A period from Session 6B: Health Status and its Impact on Mortality

Description: A summary of Medicare reform and its effect on prescription drug coverage.

Description: This essay discusses the long overdue effciencies that would improve the quality of healthcare in the United States.

Description: Essay reforming management in health care, structure of reimbursement, program management, health information, measurement systems, etc.

Description: This abstract describes a presentation that uses a dataset provided by a private insurance company which contained demographic, cost, and diagnostic data which allows the determination of which factors drove costs up and how these factors will affect the total cost for future years.