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 chapter focuses on creating practical models that aid in the prediction of the risk of readmission to a specific hospital within 30 days of discharge for Medicare patients, to aid in the identification and stratification of at-risk patients for hospitals considering building an intervention program in a cost-effective manner. For readers who wish to develop their own predictive model, a dataset is provided on the Actexmadriver.com website, and R code is provided in the appendix to this chapter.

Description: 2014 marked a new beginning for small group(SG) health insurance market ushered in with adjusted community rated products priced from a single risk pool. It was anticipated that the mandated pooling of the risk would result in higher rates, especially for healthier groups. It is the aim of this article to show whether that view bears out in the actual market rates and if it is higher, then by how much. The article provides a point in time(1st quarter 2025) comparison of premium rates under two segments of the small group market, namely Qualified Health Plans(QHP) available under the small group ACA market versus self-insured Multiple Employer Welfare Arrangements(MEWA) plans.