Description: Provides an overview of developments in the healthcare market including provider billing practices. Provides an overview of the Government Finance Officer’s Association (GFOA) in New York on Dec. 6, 2018

Description: A summary recap of the recent SOA Health Conference held in Dallas, TX in June of 2025. With the intentional use of AI to assist with the summary, this article gives a good overview of the recent conference with personal commentary from one of the attendees.

Description: This article provides an overview of critical illness insurance: history, product description, and the three primary ways to offer critical illness coverage in the United States. This article also contains an illustration of an issue age premium rate calculation, as well as product features and rating applications specific to the various types of critical illness coverage.

Description: Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), groups with 50 or less full time employee equivalents will eventually be subject to the ACA’s modified community rating rules. While some groups will see lower premiums than they would have without the ACA, others will see significant premium increases. Many of the latter type opted for transitional relief beginning in 2014 to avoid the ACA as long as possible. With the end of transitional relief approaching in 2018, what will these groups do? One option will be to self-insure using a product generically termed Level Funding.

Description: Discover the key components of value-based care (VBC) contracts and their impact on provider credibility. Learn about benchmarks, measurement period results, and the unique challenges providers face in managing insurance risk. Gain insights into reducing costs and aligning financial incentives in the US healthcare market.

Description: With the medical insurance market experiencing health care inflation of 10 to 13 percent and medical costs averaging above $8,000 per year per employee less for single employees and more for employees with families, employers are looking at alternative options. Politicians and regulators are as well.

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.

Description: This article is an update on the No Surprises Act, which is a U.S. Act aimed to reduce the risk that a person unexpectedly receives out of network charges for their health care visits. This is Part 2; Part 1 was featured in Health Watch's Sept 2024 issue.

Description: This article is an update on the No Surprises Act, which is a U.S. Act aimed to reduce the risk that a person unexpectedly receives out of network charges for their health care visits.