Description: A divisive confrontation over health care pricing is almost inevitable over the next few years. What will ultimately happen is a political decision, not an actuarial one—but it will have major consequences for the trend in health care costs and the divergence between public and private insurance premiums.

Description: The focus of the webcast on Modeling Long–Term Medical Trends for Valuation Purposes was a discussion of the underlying methodology of the model, a walk through of the actual model, and a review of the considerations for its practical usage by actuaries. The running time of this video is 1 hour and 3 minutes. It is a presentation of slides without audio.

Description: This article aims to measure the accuracy of official projections.

Description: The “Getzen Model” is a set of linked formulas to facilitate projections of average medical care cost increases over the long run.

Description: Supporting Excel file for Getzen Model 2022.

Description: A divisive confrontation over health care pricing is almost inevitable over the next few years. What will ultimately happen is a political decision, not an actuarial one—but it will have major consequences for the trend in health care costs and the divergence between public and private insurance premiums.

Description: COVID has washed over healthcare like a tsunami. According to Medicare actuaries, trends have been turned upside down in 2021, but will reverse back in 2023 as medical costs rebound. It is more prudent to base projections on long run trends for a period after the storm, extrapolating from 2026 forward, leaving the intervening turbulence (years 2022 -2025) mostly unspecified.

Description: The aftershocks of the COVID pandemic will pass --- eventually. Government subsidies and spending soared in 2020 to meet the challenges of the pandemic. Health expenditures leapt from 17.6% of GDP to 19.7%, and then dropped to 18.8% in 2021, and will fall again to 18.2% (projected) in 2022, but are expected to return to the long-run trend by 2024 and gradually rise thereafter. However, during the next few years most attention will be paid to dealing with complex aftershocks from the flood of Covid funding in 2020 and 2021, a surge of inflation in 2022, and a looming recession in 2023.

Description: An excerpt from a presentation at the 2014 Living to 100 Symposium, this article describes an open-source model for use by actuaries attempting to estimate future health benefit costs, discusses its strengths and limitations, and projects that spending for those age over 65 will take more than $13 trillion by 2055, about 50 percent of total medical expenditures.