Editor's Corner

By Tom Vicente

In the Public Interest, August 2021

Welcome to the August edition of In the Public Interest, the newsletter for the Social Insurance and Public Finance (SIPF) Section. This edition of the newsletter highlights a few of the social insurance (SI) related topics that were presented at the recent SOA Health meeting. They covered a variety of topics including the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid issues and featured a former member of the Congressional Budget Office providing a perspective on the budget scoring process as well as a discussion with Senator William Cassidy. 

In addition to the sessions, the SIPF Section announced that it was putting out a “Call for Essays” contest. As more people come to depend on SI for their health care coverage, the importance of identifying innovative actuarially driven potential solutions to aid with challenges and concerns such as provider willingness to treat SI beneficiaries, the impact of social determinants of health as well as many others becomes more important. The call for essays seeks to further explore the role of SI in providing health care coverage in the U.S. In issuing this call for essays, the SIPF Section aims to gather perspectives, opinions and data on the possible short- and long-term consequences of current health-related SI programs and potential future ones. The organizers are particularly interested in the potential impact of these programs on a variety of stakeholders—individuals, employers, Federal, State, and local governments and others—and both direct and indirect possible outcomes.

The overall theme of this call for essays is: What are ways that social insurance can address some of the gaps in our current health insurance landscape as we move forward into the 21st century? We have deliberately written this call for essays with a broad scope to allow authors a wide range of options in crafting their essays.

As such, authors are free to take a macro focus on programs in general or choose to focus on one or more individual programs. Similarly, authors may also discuss other insurance benefits that support health coverage, such as paid family leave, long-term care, short-term disability, or other HIPAA-excepted benefit plans.

Please visit the SIPF Section on the SOA website for contest details (https://www.soa.org/sections/social-ins-pub-fin/future-social-insurance-call-essays/).

We look forward to hearing from you!

Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual author and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries, the newsletter editors, or the respective author’s employers.

Tom Vicente, FSA, EA, MAAA, is a senior consulting actuary at Bolton. He can be reached at tvicente@boltonusa.com.