Description: Chris Smith, vice chair of the Actuary of the Future section, had the privilege of attending the SOA Health meeting in Seattle for the first time this year. Read about his experience and thoughts on why you should plan to attend an SOA-sponsored conference for your career growth.

Description: A brief review of the 2024 SOA Health Meeting in Baltimore

Description: Description of the design and purpose of the military health system and Veterans Health Administration's programs. Covers the types of benefits offered and how these programs differ from typical commercial health systems.

Description: Cell and Gene Therapy (CGT) are life-changing treatments where conditions such as cancer, hemophilia, spinal muscular atrophy and blindness are being cured. These are great for individuals and society, but the treatment costs are expensive which is bad for payers and reinsurers. This article explores ways for health reinsurance actuaries to participate in the space and evaluate the risk associated with these treatments

Description: The big event of 2023 is the launch of multiple Humira biosimilars, which began in January with the arrival of Amgen’s Amjevita on the market. The launch of Amjevita kicks off the process of changing the specialty drug marketplace in the United States. The expectation of the full impact of this big event is very hopeful, but there is still uncertainty several months after its beginning. Humira is the highest-selling drug in the world and has been since 2013 (Figure 1)—except for when COVID-19 projects temporarily surpassed it. The world is eagerly awaiting the launch of multiple biosimilar drugs to compete with Humira and hopefully bring more competitive pricing to the benefit of payers and patients everywhere.

Description: This article focuses on the recent surge of digital medicine data being seen in the healthcare industry. While an increase in data can generally be perceived as good, it is important to remember that current privacy practices need to be maintained, if not strengthened, to continually protect healthcare members. The COVID-19 pandemic helped fuel digital medicine data, but it also created new avenues for privacy to potentially be compromised (i.e. healthcare employees using personal devices while working from home). Digital medicine data is a very powerful asset, but it is also a massive responsibility. If mishandled, this data can cause more harm than good.

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: Critical illness insurance is a popular supplemental health insurance product in the U.S. market. This article discusses how carriers have recently sought to add value by expanded the benefits offered in their critical illness products. Specifically, the article discusses the consumer need and development considerations of adding benefits for autism Spectrum Disorder, Mental health disorders, Specified Disease Coverage, and enhance Cancer Coverage to a critical illness contract.

Description: Article discussing how the pursuit of value-based care as a consequence of health care reform laws such as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the Medicare Modernization Act has accelerated the use of risk adjustment and what it means to actuaries.

Description: There is a big wave of changes coming to the pharmacy market. The extent is not yet fully known, but there are trends we can follow that help us predict. Biosimilar uptake is key to driving savings, but it can take a while to ramp up. Biosimilars bring competition, and this coming wave will bring unprecedented Biosimilar competition.