Description: While the higher general inflation in the broader U.S. economy hasn't emerged in the healthcare market (yet); there is expectations for it to have a lagged impact especially as the full impact of COVID on suppressed utilization emerges. As the healthcare system transitions past COVID, overall costs are expected to trend higher due to overall inflationary pressures as well as new treatments such as the highly anticipated new gene and cell therapies often with costs over millions of dollars.As costs rise, more companies are looking to self-insure their health insurance to control cost increases and are leveraging innovative stop loss programs including captives. Captive insurance markets have seen significant growth and diverse implementations allowing companies to self-fund while managing the risk of large claims and increasing costs. Payers are also looking to control costs and implement value based payment schemes to bend the trend curve and manage costs. Medicare has also adopted new value based payment programs (ACO Reach) which will impact commercial payers and are important to understand. Come gain an understanding of the historical and projected future medical cost drivers including the projected impact of new therapies and then impact on the stop loss markets. Additionally, you'll gain a deeper understanding on how recent innovations in the stop loss market such as the growth in the captive market, level funded and aggregate only products have helped employers manage their costs and overall risk profile.

Description: Essays advocating for incentive compensation linked to the level of risk in an organization.

Description: The SOA is interested in understanding how companies are performing scenario analysis, thinking through how various stakeholders (regulators, general public, competitors) could be reacting to a large-scale large-impact event over a multi-year period.

Description: Emerging risks are new or evolving, so require novel treatment by risk teams. The results from the 15th annual survey of emerging risks, sponsored by the Canadian Institute of Actuaries (CIA), Society of Actuaries (SOA) and Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) will be shared. Long-term trends and highlights from open-ended questions will be shared, along with analysis of how the practitioner can use this information. While risk appetite statements profess a stable and consistent process, research shows that companies rotate through methodologies with management teams and that the most successful teams have the flexibility to adjust to current conditions.

Description: The insurance industry hinges on accurate actuarial assumptions. This session explores how insurers can leverage AI/machine learning (ML) to unlock greater accuracy and granularity in assumption setting, while effectively managing risks, implementing strong governance frameworks, and meeting validation expectations from regulators.

Description: The newsletter outlines the book selected for the book club discussion and summarizes the discussions held during the book club meeting.

Description: ALM actuaries are critical to insurance companies and pension funds—monitoring ALM positioning, measuring risk exposures, and informing the investment decision making process. However, there are opportunities for actuaries to further increase their impact by expanding their scope and embedding actuarial expertise throughout the investment lifecycle. This session will cover new and enhanced ALM techniques to improve ALM risk and return outcomes, including better integration of credit and market risk measurement, and enhanced liability-driven investing strategies.

Description: Welcome to the appellate court. We’ve seen some scare in mass media on climate-linked mortality, but not sure what to make of that in our actuarial practice. Both data and research is quickly evolving around climate change’s impact globally and to US mortality. We’ll share a few tidbits from recent actuarial research on wildfires and air pollution in particular. At the same time, there are still many unknowns on the long-term effects, and this phase of understanding is ripe for calling on a diverse group of experts. We bring expert witnesses from different professions to the actuarial stand to answer whether climate change’s impacts from heat wildfire-induced air pollution to mental health is a credible and material threat to insured mortality. The audience should come ready to judge the arguments presented.

Description: The introduction and effective application of US GAAP LDTI have increased the scrutiny of those reviewing the updated financial results. That is because LDTI has resulted in significant changes in actuarial reserving and deferred acquisition cost (DAC) models for long-duration contracts, including significant changes to data, assumptions and required disclosures. In light of the changes, greater reliance has been put on companies’ model risk management (MRM) teams and model validations to assess the conceptual soundness and accuracy of their companies’ actuarial models and to assess that the underlying data and process utilized are suitable and appropriate. This article covers a brief background on model validation, walk through a sample LDTI-focused model validation framework/test plan, then provide insights on common LDTI-related validation observations based on the authors' prior validation experience.

Description: Regular update provided by the Chair of the Joint Risk Management Section on initiatives put forth by the section council for the current year.