Description: This abstract describes a paper that discusses insurance claim forecasting using econometric stepwise regression to analyze historical data.

Description: In Medicaid rate development, actuaries have not historically shared models that developed the margin (i.e., underwriting gain) assumption. This is unfortunate, given the margin assumption is one of the most critical components of the rate development in ensuring financial solvency of the Medicaid managed care organizations (MCOs). In this session, we will discuss the primary components of the this assumption and will share working models that help actuaries quantify these components—including the cost of capital and risk (or contingency) margin. We expect a lively discussion as we “open the black box” and discuss these actuarial assumptions in the public for the first time.

Description: This article provides a brief introduction to forecasting methods that are potentially relevant to actuarial work.

Description: This abstract describes a paper that considers various specifications of the general discrete time risk model in which a serial dependence structure is introduced between the claims for each period.

Description: Presented at Living to 100 Symposium, January 2011. This research studies coherent mortality modeling by combining a group of populations with similar period effects - e.g., mortality behaviors - in an effort to improve the stability of mortality modeling for older ages.

Description: According to the Actuarial Standards Board’s Actuarial Standard of Practice No. 49 (ASOP 49), actuarially sound Medicaid managed care capitation rates will include a provision for underwriting gain in order to provide compensation for the risks assumed by an MCO. However, there is no generally accepted method for quantifying underwriting gain in managed Medicaid capitation rates. This article discusses a new model developed to address this void and calculate underwriting gain. The model was developed by researching existing financial literature and performing a statistical analysis of industry data to build out a framework that can be leveraged to estimate underwriting gain.

Description: This is a poster presentation about a study to evaluate various methods for projecting health benefit populations.

Description: A summary of a new feature in the newsletter: a forecasting application contest. The Forecasting and Futurism Section will award a 16GB iPad to the section member who develops the best actuarial application of a judgmental forecasting method, incorporating best practices outlined in this issue’s article titled “Best Practices in Judgmental Forecasting.” In addition, we will feature the winning application in an issue of the newsletter.

Description: At the 2009 SOA Annual Meeting in Boston, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shared some thoughts on Black Swans, operating in the fourth quadrant, and living in the world of Extremistan versus Mediocristan during his keynote speech, all of which can be found in his published work. The follow-up session, summarized in this article, addresses the real question: What do we actuaries do about these phenomena?

Description: Presented at Living to 100 symposium, January 2002. This paper proposes a standard operating procedure for testing the Gompertz assumption using yearly age-specific mortality data, and the impacts of the data collection period and population sizes on the testing results are discussed.