Description: Come experience an informative and invigorating webcast focused on an overview of the reinsurance market. Discover the opportunities and challenges that this market can create and how to best understand them. You can also expect investment within the reinsurance market to be a particular highlighted topic. Explore an overview of key components of asset strategies and develop a knowledge base on how to fully comprehend and shape the reinsurance business. If you're ready to elevate your understanding of reinsurance, then tune in to this webcast.

Description: This session is designed to inform you about the current state of mental health and mental health care in the United States, as well as future trajectories. By exploring topics such as plan design, provider network, provider reimbursement, and other relevant channels, this session aims to enlighten everyone on existing challenges and the strategies being employed to tackle them. Notably, this will include and highlight proposed changes to the mental health parity. Additionally, attendees will hear from a mental health provider/academic on these topics to gain a non-actuarial perspective.

Description: The instructors in this boot camp session will highlight the SOA's work on an updated Medicaid underwriting margin model. This research project includes an excel model, a set of instructions and a paper describing the key components of underwriting margin, including cost of capital and risk margin.

Description: This report provides actuaries and other professionals working with risk, data and analytics or program evaluation in the health care space with considerations and frameworks related to the use of determinants of health (DOH) in data and actuarial work streams. Such frameworks can leverage new data sources to enrich health care data analysis to move beyond traditional data elements, such as age, gender, zip code or health diagnosis.

Description: This article attempts to make a modest contribution to the dialogue on the potential and risks associated with novel treatments such as cell & gene therapies. With a fast-expanding roster of what are believed to be one-time treatments at ever increasing price points aimed at curing a wider swatch of the population, they are as much a source of relief for patients stuck in medical limbo, as they are a source of anxiety for payers.

Description: The Federal funds rate increased by 4.25% in 2022 with further increases in 2023, which have already resulted in a liquidity crisis for a few banks. As the rapid increase of the interest rates pushed the new money rates above the yields of many life insurers’ investment portfolios, insurance companies are facing a dilemma between compressed margins from peer pressure and the concern with liquidity shortfalls and realized capital losses should mass surrenders happen. This paper discussed main emerging risks under rising interest rate environment, and several ways to mitigate these risks.

Description: The article contains a description of the Emerging Topics Community. The focus of the article is what is a community, what makes the Emerging Topics Community special, and benefits of the Community. Included after the discussion on the community are ways to get involved and be a part of the community.

Description: Though some defined contribution plans have added retirement income options in the form of annuities, there is a challenge to retirees in deciding whether to select such options and if so the amount to purchase. This article discusses a variety of considerations that retirees should be aware of when making a decision to annuitize.

Description: This article summarizes findings from a recently published peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Risk and Insurance (Hanewald et al., 2025),[1], which examined how access to housing wealth affects stated demand for LTC insurance in China. We conducted a survey of homeowners aged 45-–64 across 49 cities in China and found that offering reverse mortgages or home reversion products significantly increased stated demand for LTC insurance. This article highlights the study’s key results and implications for insurers, actuaries, and policymakers.