Description: In this article the author chides the authors of the 'SUMMARY OF THE 2010 ANNUAL REPORTS SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE BOARDS OF TRUSTEES' for presenting biased 'misinformation and disinformation in their Message to the Public, and for their contribution to public ignorance about Social Security and Medicare financing.' He attributes this to the fact that the Boards are devoid of public trustees, and consist solely of partisan political appointees.

Description: This session at the 2003 Valuation Actuary Symposium covers regulatory activity with respect to health insurance that is of interest to valuation actuaries. Topics discussed include financial reporting, health risk-based capital, health reserves, and long term care issues.

Description: The SOA Reinsurance Research Section is seeking proposals on Mortality Improvement Independ – Independent Analysis. Mortality improvement is an important assumption for projecting future liability cashflows and has a material financial impact on a company. Mortality improvement is a hot topic in the industry and companies show significant interest in understanding the key factors that differentiate mortality improvement. The focus of this research is to gain a better understanding of the main drivers of mortality improvement:

Description: Recently, the SCAN Foundation, AARP, LeadingAge, and HHS funded economic modeling conducted by Milliman and the Urban Institute around LTC reform elements. The LTC industry has over the years also generated ideas to address the on-coming expansion of LTC needs in the U.S. For this article, we have brought together three individuals who have long involvement with LTC financing to discuss some of the recent ideas and provide some perspectives on their pluses and minuses.

Description: This presentation from Session 17 of the SOA 2004 San Antonio Spring Meeting focuses on new product concepts that are emerging to capture the huge emerging retirement market. Panelists discuss concepts such as incorporating defined benefit concepts into defined contribution plans, insuring the longevity tail, innovations in 'traditional' annuities, 412i insured pension plans for small businesses, and highly impaired care annuities for people already incurring long-term-care costs.. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 30, No. 2.

Description: In this session, participants learn the issues large employers face with respect to increased health care costs, the goals and objectives of the value-based purchasing initiative and similar initiatives and the different methods used to implement these initiatives. The Leapfrog Group, a hospital performance initiative, and Bridges to Excellence, a physician performance initiative, are specifically discussed. From the Record of the Society of Actuaries, Volume 30, No. 1, Session 31

Description: This is the complete issue of the NewsDirect newsletter developed by the Marting and Distribution Section of the Society of Actuaires. It covers a variety of topics including sales of life insurance, direct mail campaigns and summaries of some conferences and symposiums.

Description: Traditional pension mathematics assumes that mortality rates are fixed at a valuation date. If mortality rates reduce after a valuation date, the liabilities of a defined benefit plans 'DB plans' increase, leading to deficits. Such deficits are somewhat unpredictable, because the evolution of mortality rates is a random process. This problem, which is often called longevity risk, makes the maintenance of DB plans difficult. The International Accounting Standards Board 'IASB' has plans to tackle the arduous problem of how to disclose longevity risk on financial statements. The IASB was established in 2001 to create universal accounting standards, called International Accounting Reporting Standards 'IFRSs'. A primary objective of this paper is to propose a number of methods that can help actuaries and plan sponsors quantify and disclose longevity risk.

Description: Preview of the LTC section's sessions at the SOA Annual Meeting in October 2008, including claims management, litigation and public relations, preparing for PBA and stochastic modeling, pricing, research studies, and securitizations and reinsurance.

Description: Recently researchers, practitioners, and regulators had intense debates about how to treat the data collection threshold in operational risk modeling. There are several approaches under consideration—the empirical approach, the “naive” approach, the shifted approach, and the truncated approach—for fitting the loss severity distribution. Since each approach is based on a different set of assumptions, different probability models emerge. Thus, model uncertainty arises. When possible we investigate such model uncertainty analytically, otherwise we use Monte Carlo simulations. For specific parametric examples we consider exponential and Lomax distributions which are special cases of the generalized Pareto family. Our primary goal is to quantify the effect of model uncertainty on risk measurements. This is accomplished by evaluating the probability of each approach producing conservative capital allocations based on the value-at-risk measure. These explorations are further illustrated using a real data set for legal losses in a business unit (Cruz, 2002).