Description: This paper reviews the geriatric literature to identify risk factors that could be used by insurers to identify existing or incipient frailty.

Description: Chapter 2 reviews previous research in the area of health risk assessment. From A Comparative Analysis of Methods of Health Risk Assessment, M-HB96-1.

Description: Chapter 7 reviews several items that the study identified as requirements for a good risk assessment method. They are: accurate predictability, practicality and reasonable cost, limitation on ability to game the system, timeliness in regard to premiums, appropriate incentives for efficiency. From A Comparative Analysis of Methods of Health Risk Assessment, M-HB96-1.

Description: This is an abstract for the paper, Analysis of Costs for a Chronic Disease with Acute High Cost Episodes by Marjorie Rosenberg and Philip Farrell.

Description: Successful healthcare reform: First, it must help that must keep healthy people healthy. Second, it must help people mitigate or eliminate the health-risks associated with unhealthy lifestyle behavior choices, and Third, it must ensure the provision of evidence-based care to those who are ill.

Description: Presented at the Living to 100 Symposium, January 2011. This paper examines the relationship between the earliest stages of dementia—mild cognitive impairment—and mortality. Using data from long-term care insurance applicants, and linking this to the Social Security Master Death File, the authors focus on the classification results of two cognitive screens used at various times in the underwriting process. Applying the Cox Proportional Hazards Model as well as relative mortality ratio analysis, the authors show that the proportion of individuals classified as cognitively impaired have significantly higher relative mortality compared to those classified as cognitively intact.

Description: Author reply to Jay Olshansky’s discussion of “Health Expectancy” paper and reply from authors Faye Albert, John Bragg and Jason Brooks.

Description: This paper proposes a new method to price the longevity risk premia in order to tackle the pricing obstacle. Based on the equivalent utility pricing principle, our method obtains the minimum risk premium required by the longevity insurance seller and the maximum acceptable risk premium by the longevity insurance buyer.

Description: Presented at Living to 100 Symposium, January 2011. This paper first explores the current state and contributing causes of obesity. It then explores the mortality and health care costs of obesity. It ends with a discussion of its management.

Description: Chapter 6 identifies four general and practical considerations in comparing methods: practicality and administrative cost, ability to restrict manipulation, timeliness and predictability, and incentives for efficiency and quality care. From A Comparative Analysis of Methods of Health Risk Assessment, M-HB96-1.