Description: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law March 23, 2010. The transformative health care legislation was multi-faceted, but its primary purpose was to reduce the number of uninsured Americans. In alignment with the SOA’s Strategic Plan objective to “inform the public’s understanding of key societal issues”, this report examines the various publications reporting on the uninsured rate which stakeholders frequently access to measure policy efficacy and inform future policy considerations.

Description: Healthcare risk adjustment methodologies have become increasingly complex, largely due to the belief that complexity enhances accuracy. However, a disconnect exists between how healthcare risk is assessed and how payments are adjusted. This article explores the stark difference between measuring the accuracy of a risk assessment model at a member level, and that of a risk adjustment mechanism at the health plan level. I show that a highly simplified approach that does not use diagnosis codes can have similar accuracy on risk adjusted payments to models that do. These findings suggest that accuracy is not a barrier to developing simpler risk adjustment methodologies, which can improve payment accuracy and reduce the financial incentive for coding diagnoses.

Description: This report covers the latest emerging trends in U.S. population mortality. The SOA relied upon data furnished by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Observations are based on the CDC’s recent release of 2021 mortality experience, along with prior mortality experience data from 1999 through 2020.

Description: LIMRA, Reinsurance Group of America (RGA), the Society of Actuaries (SOA) Research Institute, and TAI have collaborated on an ongoing effort to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the individual life insurance industry’s mortality experience and share the emerging results with the insurance industry and the public. This report documents a high-level analysis of the claims that have been reported.

Description: The dental and dental insurance industries continue to experience significant innovation advancements in a variety of areas including claims, customer acquisition, teletechnology applications, AI for dental disease progression and more. These advancements are occurring at the dental office as well as within dental insurance companies. Hear about some of the latest innovations in the dental and dental insurance spaces andl gain an understanding as to how cutting-edge developments will impact dental actuarial.

Description: This will be the most fun you'll ever have learning about applying rigorous credibility standards in the real world! Measuring provider performance is crucial to value-based care, but no one wants to be told their data is not credible-so, what's an actuary to do? This session will mix in-depth theory with the messy realities of program implementation to give you tools for the real world. Whether or not you have ASOP 25 framed on your bedside table, you'll walk away from this session ready for the next time a business partner insists that 50 members 'is absolutely credible'.

Description: In the past months, as COVID-19 has forced the reduced activity in the U.S. economy there has been some very substantial, but varied effects on the U.S. healthcare system. There is a lot of potential for confusion amongst providers and patients with regards to decisions related to which services ought to be rendered and which ought to be deferred. Two specific agencies – the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the American College of Surgeons (ACS) have put together some guidance to add more clarity towards what types of services should be provided and what types ought to be deferred. In addition, this paper includes a discussion on what types of services are most likely to be deferred, and which ones will accrue pent-up demand to be released when many of the deferred services become available again.

Description: This is a brief report that summarizes recent changes in the prevalent medical loss ratio methodologies and also looks at some of the more recent experience of health insurers that filed medical loss ratio reports.

Description: Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) include the social and physical conditions in which people are born, live and work on a daily basis. This project advances a growing body of literature to inform the ongoing optimization of population health and payment models.

Description: The SOA has translated four of its AIT report summaries into both Traditional and Simplified Chinese. They are “Behavioral Science”, “Big Data and the Future Actuary”, “Cancer Genomics”, and “Cloud Computing and Machine Learning Uses in the Actuarial Profession.