Description: Healthcare costs have been rising faster than general inflation for many years. Early models that predicted this past pattern projected healthcare expenditure growth that continued to outpace total expenditure growth leading to the fallacious position that the whole of the US economy would ultimately be consumed by healthcare. This paper presents a long term healthcare trends resource model, prepared for the Society of Actuaries by Professor Thomas Getzen, that includes capacity constraints to ensure the long-term projection is rational. The motivation for creation of the model was driven by its potential usage as a resource for the estimation of reportable liabilities for retiree healthcare benefits as specified under FAS 106 and GASB 45 accounting statements.

Description: A research project with the Society of Actuaries on interest rate hedging on traditional life and health insurance.

Description: The purpose of this report is to start an informed debate on the issues surrounding the treatment of diversification in the solvency assessment of insurers. The members of the Chief Risk Officer Forum herein suggest a framework for how diversification should be treated within a prudential regulatory framework.

Description: This is a Confidentiality Agreement to be signed prior to contributing data to the Society of Actuaries' study that investigated the motivating factors contributing to the exercise of stock options.

Description: Call for essays on how actuaries can apply their financial skills to support non-profit financial management and promote societal purpose.

Description: With the growing threat of cyber incidents, organizations and governments are rightfully concerned. In recent years, cyber incidents have caused significant losses to entities and insurers across the world. Therefore, there is a need to understand and provide greater context around the topic of catastrophic cyber risk, which has implications for insurance companies, reinsurers, regulators, consumers, and society. Taking a multi-disciplinary, holistic approach, an expert panel study was conducted on catastrophic cyber risk in this four-part series of discussions and subsequent reports.

Description: This literature review provides insights on emerging technologies that interact with the actuarial profession within the space of microinsurance for the purpose of establishing a frame of reference for actuaries to use in their work. Furthermore, it intends to spark readers’ interest in, and create a vision for, how microinsurance and its associated technologies may impact the actuarial industry in the future.

Description: A brief overview of recent AIT research papers in summarized format.

Description: The estimation of adequate reserves for outstanding claims is one of the main activities of actuaries in property/casualty insurance. The need to estimate future claims has led to the development of many loss reserving techniques. This paper is about the situation that occurs in claims reserving when there are negative values in the development triangle of incremental claim amounts. Typically, these negative values will be the result of salvage recoveries, payments from third parties, total or partial cancellation of outstanding claims due to initial overestimation of the loss or to possible favorable jury decision in favor of the insurer, rejection by the insurer, or just plain errors. Some of the traditional methods of claims reserving, such as the chain-ladder technique, may produce estimates of the reserves even when there are negative values. However, many methods can break down in the presence of enough [in number and/or size] negative incremental claims if certain constraints are not met. Historically the chain-ladder method has been used as a gold standard [benchmark], due to its generalized use and ease of application. A method that improves on the gold standard is one that can handle situations where there are many negative incremental claims and/or some of these are large. This paper presents a Bayesian model to consider negative incremental values, based on a three parameter log-normal distribution. The model presented here allows the actuary to provide point estimates and measures of dispersion, as well as the complete distribution for outstanding claims from which the reserves can be derived. The model applies Markov Chain Monte Carlo [MCMC] using the package WinBUGS.

Description: Using data from the Health & Retirement Study [HRS], a two-part medical claim prediction model is estimated for a cohort of survey respondents approaching Medicare-eligibility age. A High Deductible Health Plan [HDHP] with a companion Health Savings Account [HSA] is applied to simulated claims streams to model the build-up of HSA assets over the near-retirement years. Results show that the HSA is a grossly inadequate savings vehicle to provide for retiree medical care expenses at age 65. Moreover, HSA adequacy worsens exponentially with diminishing health status. Based on this simulation, it is apparent that Baby Boomers cannot adequately provide for the costs of medical care in retirement using HSAs exclusively.