Description: Joe Wurzburger, Staff Fellow at the SOA, shares his views and insights about the health care industry in general and the Health Section's role in particular.

Description: How benchmarking actual performance to a published source is a useful tool in assessing the value added by a particular program or MCO, Issue No. 38.

Description: This article discusses the impact for MACRA legislation that will impact the Medicare Supplement market in 2020 and the ramifications for Med Supp carriers

Description: Mining Electronic Health Records using a Natural Language Processor.

Description: This article summarizes the 2016 SOA Annual Meeting and Exhibit from a Health Section perspective.

Description: The interview discusses the ACA exchange intiatives program, a strategic project of the SOA focusing on ACA marketplace emerging data and actuarial principles

Description: Read the February 2018 issue of Health Watch, published by the Health Section. Practical information for actuaries, articles impact sections, section activities.

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.