The Health Care Safety Net in a Post-Reform World examines how national health care reform will impact safety net programs that serve low-income and uninsured patients. The "safety net" refers to the collection of hospitals, clinics, and doctors who treat disadvantaged people, including those without insurance, regardless of their ability to pay. Despite comprehensive national health care reform, over twenty million people will remain uninsured. And many of those who obtain insurance from reform will continue to face shortages of providers in their communities willing or able to serve them. As the demand for care grows with expanded insurance, so will the pressure on an overstretched safety net. This book, with contributions from leading health care scholars, is the first comprehensive assessment of the safety net in over a decade. Rather than view health insurance and the health care safety net as alternatives to each other, it examines their potential to be complementary aspects of a broader effort to achieve equity and quality in health care access. It also considers whether the safety net can be improved and strengthened to a level that can provide truly universal access, both through expanded insurance and the creation of a well-integrated and reasonably supported network of direct health care access for the uninsured. Seeing safety net institutions as key components of post-health care reform in the United States-as opposed to stop-gap measures or as part of the problem-is a bold idea. And as presented in this volume, it is an idea whose time has come.

The interaction between mathematicians and statisticians has been shown to be an effective approach for dealing with actuarial, insurance and financial problems, both from an academic perspective and from an operative one. The collection of original papers presented in this volume pursues precisely this purpose. It covers a wide variety of subjects in actuarial, insurance and finance fields, all treated in the light of the successful cooperation between the above two quantitative approaches. The papers published in this volume present theoretical and methodological contributions and their applications to real contexts. With respect to the theoretical and methodological contributions, some of the considered areas of investigation are: actuarial models; alternative testing approaches; behavioral finance; clustering techniques; coherent and non-coherent risk measures; credit scoring approaches; data envelopment analysis; dynamic stochastic programming; financial contagion models; financial ratios; intelligent financial trading systems; mixture normality approaches; Monte Carlo-based methods; multicriteria methods; nonlinear parameter estimation techniques; nonlinear threshold models; particle swarm optimization; performance measures; portfolio optimization; pricing methods for structured and non-structured derivatives; risk management; skewed distribution analysis; solvency analysis; stochastic actuarial valuation methods; variable selection models; time series analysis tools. As regards the applications, they are related to real problems associated, among the others, to: banks; collateralized fund obligations; credit portfolios; defined benefit pension plans; double-indexed pension annuities; efficient-market hypothesis; exchange markets; financial time series; firms; hedge funds; non-life insurance companies; returns distributions; socially responsible mutual funds; unit-linked contracts. This book is aimed at academics, Ph.D. students, practitioners, professionals and researchers. But it will also be of interest to readers with some quantitative background knowledge.

Learn from some of the most respected women in insurance and risk management Women to Watch presents the advice, guidance, and lessons learned from the most successful women in risk management and insurance. For the past 10 years, Business Insurance has highlighted key women in the field—women noted for their skills, accomplishments, courage, wisdom, and everyday steel. In this book, these women present their stories in their own words; through essays and anecdotes about key issues, key moments, and crucial lessons, former Women to Watch honorees provide a glimpse into what it takes to make it. They've battled obstacles, hurdles, and institutionalized career impediments—and they've come out on top; their stories provide inspiration, motivation, and concrete, real-world guidance for all women who seek advancement in the insurance and risk management fields. Business Insurance receives several hundred Women to Watch nominations every year; of those, they honor only 25. These women are the cream of the crop, and their unique insights into all-too-common experiences can help us all rise to the top. Shatter the glass ceiling and close the wage gap Shift your perspective on what "work/life balance" means Celebrate and navigate the workplace's changing demographics Learn how successful women get it done The insurance and risk management fields look very different today than they did even 10 years ago; there is much to celebrate, but even more still left to be done. There is no substitute for the wisdom of experience, and the best lessons come from those who have navigated the path successfully. Women to Watch provides unique insight into the women who have conquered the field, and critical perspective for those who will follow.

Legal reserve life insurance in the United States and Canada as a modern instrument for meeting the quest for economic security, has attained size and significance unparalleled elsewhere in the world. It holds in a fiduciary capacity more than $60 billion and affects the lives of half the population as owners of life insurance and annuity contracts. Still in process of evolution, it helps to shape the pattern of life and is at the same time being shaped by its own environment. This third volume of lectures issued under the auspices of the S. S. Huebner Foundation for Insurance Education deals with significant trends and problems in life insurance at the midpoint of the twentieth century. In so doing, it bears testimony to the vitality and adaptive power of this modem device for sharing one another's burdens.

This Brief presents a benefit-cost analysis of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) as well as an evaluation of its cumulative socioeconomic effects. Created by Congress in 1968, the NFIP provides flood insurance protection to property owners, in return for local government commitment to sound floodplain management. Since 1994, the NFIP has included a Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) program to provide local communities with support for flood mitigation. This book offers quantitative evidence of the net social benefit of the NFIP for the years 1996-2010, including an independent assessment of the consumer benefit. Second, it provides distributionally weighted analysis to show the socioeconomic effects of payments and claims. Finally, this Brief includes an analysis of the change in government revenue attributable to the NFIP and FMA programs. The models used in each component of the analysis are usable by others for extending and revising the analysis. Providing a comprehensive analysis of this increasingly important federal policy, this Brief will be of use to students of environmental economics and public policy as well as those interested in risk management in the era of climate change.

This book provides an introduction to investment appraisal and presents a range of methods and models, some of which are not widely known, or at least not well covered by other textbooks. Each approach is thoroughly described, evaluated and illustrated using examples, with its assumptions and limitations analyzed in terms of their implications for investment decision-making practice. Investment decisions are of vital importance to all companies. Getting these decisions right is crucial but, due to a complex and dynamic business environment, this remains a challenging management task. Effective appraisal methods are valuable tools in supporting investment decision-making. As organisations continue to seek a competitive edge, it is increasingly important that management accountants and strategic decision-makers have a sound knowledge of these tools.

Following events such as the 2008 credit crunch and financial crisis, many sectors of the economy suffered; nevertheless, reinsurance managed to maintain its strong position in the market industry and the global economic arena. Arbitration has traditionally been used in reinsurance, due in no small part to its effective, time- and cost-efficient nature. Hence, reinsurance contracts often include arbitration clauses requiring that any and all disputes arising under the contract be resolved by arbitration. The current work provides an in-depth treatment of reinsurance arbitrations and the various issues they entail in the most representative jurisdictions for such arbitrations. It also aims to pave the way for future directions of arbitration in the context of reinsurance. Any participant in the reinsurance market arena looking for a roadmap to the fascinating legal environment in which reinsurance arbitrations operate would be well advised to have this book on hand.

RISK IS UNCERTAINTY AS TO LOSS... RISK IS OMNIPRESENT AND ALL PERVASIVE... INSURANCE PROTECTS AGAINST THE ECONOMIC LOSS CAUSED BY RISK This book provides an actionable approach to the functions of the insurance industry in an easy to use examination of property, liability, life and health insurance coverages plus information on the basics of a risk management program.

Focusing on what actuaries need in practice, this introductory account provides readers with essential tools for handling complex problems and explains how simulation models can be created, used and re-used (with modifications) in related situations. The book begins by outlining the basic tools of modelling and simulation, including a discussion of the Monte Carlo method and its use. Part II deals with general insurance and Part III with life insurance and financial risk. Algorithms that can be implemented on any programming platform are spread throughout and a program library written in R is included. Numerous figures and experiments with R-code illustrate the text. The author's non-technical approach is ideal for graduate students, the only prerequisites being introductory courses in calculus and linear algebra, probability and statistics. The book will also be of value to actuaries and other analysts in the industry looking to update their skills.

Focusing on life insurance and pensions, this book addresses various aspects of modelling in modern insurance: insurance liabilities; asset-liability management; securitization, hedging, and investment strategies. With contributions from internationally renowned academics in actuarial science, finance, and management science and key people in major life insurance and reinsurance companies, there is expert coverage of a wide range of topics, for example: models in life insurance and their roles in decision making; an account of the contemporary history of insurance and life insurance mathematics; choice, calibration, and evaluation of models; documentation and quality checks of data; new insurance regulations and accounting rules; cash flow projection models; economic scenario generators; model uncertainty and model risk; model-based decision-making at line management level; models and behaviour of stakeholders. With author profiles ranging from highly specialized model builders to decision makers at chief executive level, this book should prove a useful resource to students and academics of actuarial science as well as practitioners.

In this highly influential textbook, first published in 1952, actuaries Ogborn and Coe provide a condensed overview of many aspects of life assurance for the actuary-in-training. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of actuarial practice.

The Savvy Investor’s Pocket Guide is a self-improvement guide that provides ordinary people with the tools to become financially savvy quickly and successfully. Identifying the common mistakes people make when dealing with their finances, the guide sets out how to rectify them. It also highlights how one can achieve financial independence by cutting back on some expenses, like luxury cars, and the benefits of starting to save as early as possible.

The book also explains in easy-to-understand terms how to draw up and stick to a budget; make shrewd investments in various investment vehicles; consolidate and eliminate debt; draw up a will; get the most out of short-term and life insurance; and save enough money to retire.

The Savvy Investor’s Pocket Guide serves as a wake-up call to stop wasting money and start investing for a financially secure future. A must-read for anyone who wants to not only improve their finances, but also their life in general.

Insurance is an extraordinarily useful tool to manage risk. When it works as intended, it provides financial protection to individuals and a profitable business model for insurance firms and their investors. But it is broadly misunderstood by consumers, regulators, and insurance executives. This book looks at the behavior of individuals at risk, insurance industry decision makers, and policy makers at the local, state, and federal level involved in the selling, buying, and regulating of insurance. It compares their actions to those predicted by benchmark models of choice derived from classical economic theory. When actual choices stray from predictions, the behavior is considered to be anomalous. With considerable sums of money at stake, both in consumer premiums and insurance company payouts, it is important to understand the reasons for anomalous behavior. Howard Kunreuther, Mark Pauly, and Stacey McMorrow examine these anomalies through the lens of behavioral economics, which takes into account emotions, biases, and simplified decision rules. The authors then consider if and how such behavioral anomalies could be modified to improve individual and social welfare. This book is neither a defense of the insurance industry nor an attack on it. Neither is it a consumer guide to purchasing insurance, although the authors believe that consumers will benefit from the insights it contains. Rather, this book describes situations in which both public policy and the insurance industry s collective posture need to change. This may require incentives, rules, and institutions to help reduce both inefficient and anomalous behavior, thereby encouraging behavior that will improve individual and social welfare.

The book offers a comprehensive analysis of insurance intermediaries from a capital markets perspective. It presents an up-to-date market perspective, drawing the attention to the important trends and developments in the industry and recommends strategies to secure future growth. Further, it offers a detailed description of a valuation approach specifically tailored to small and mid-sized brokers. Research on insurance intermediary M&A reveals that positive abnormal returns are achieved for acquirers. The author points out which factors lead to value creation and investigates performance drivers in the tied agent channel.

This book explores the central problems underlying the insurance of aviation war and terrorism risks and associated perils. It critically analyses the reasons why conventional insurance markets are unwilling or unable to provide sustainable insurance coverage for aviation war and terrorism risks in the aftermath of catastrophic events such as the terrorist events of September 11, 2001. It also examines some of the prominent concepts proposed and/or implemented after 9/11 to determine whether and to what extent these concepts avoid identified pitfalls. Like many of life's essentials, the importance of insurance is most evident when it is not available. The sheer scale and magnitude of the insurance losses that followed 9/11 caused conventional insurance markets (which hitherto had been offering generous insurance coverage for aviation war and terrorism risks to air transport operators for little or no premium) to withdraw coverage forthwith. The ensuing absence or insufficiency of commercial insurance coverage for aviation war and terrorism risks has sparked a global search for viable and sustainable alternatives. Ten years have since elapsed, and despite numerous efforts, the fundamental problems remain unresolved. The book proceeds on the premise that the underlying issues are not entirely legal in nature; they have immense economic, psychological and policy implications that cannot be underestimated. A multidisciplinary approach is therefore used in examining the issues, drawing heavily upon analytical principles adapted from law and economics and behavioural law and economics. It is hoped that the resulting study will be beneficial not only to lawyers and those interested in aviation insurance but also to economists, air transport insurance program managers, capital market investors and governmental policymakers, both at the national and international levels.

The main purpose of the book is to show how a viscosity approach can be used to tackle control problems in insurance. The problems covered are the maximization of survival probability as well as the maximization of dividends in the classical collective risk model. The authors consider the possibility of controlling the risk process by reinsurance as well as by investments. They show that optimal value functions are characterized as either the unique or the smallest viscosity solution of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation; they also study the structure of the optimal strategies and show how to find them. The viscosity approach was widely used in control problems related to mathematical finance but until quite recently it was not used to solve control problems related to actuarial mathematical science. This book is designed to familiarize the reader on how to use this approach. The intended audience is graduate students as well as researchers in this area.

In four empirical studies, this cumulative work provides valuable insights for marketing executives of statutory health insurance funds and social media responsible. Paper I and II provide evidence about the importance and interplay of price and corporate reputation on the market of statutory health insurance. The second part changes perspective to corporate communication issues in the social media environment. By introducing the "social media brand value chain" paper III conducts a literature review of state of the art social media research. By means of a field experiment on Facebook, paper IV shows that brands do not necessarily have to communicate via their brand fan pages in a highly interactive and vivid way to positively influence attitudinal measures among their fan base.

Knowledge of risk models and the assessment of risk is a fundamental part of the training of actuaries and all who are involved in financial, pensions and insurance mathematics. This book provides students and others with a firm foundation in a wide range of statistical and probabilistic methods for the modelling of risk, including short-term risk modelling, model-based pricing, risk-sharing, ruin theory and credibility. It covers much of the international syllabuses for professional actuarial examinations in risk models, but goes into further depth, with worked examples, exercises and detailed case studies. The authors also use the statistical package R to demonstrate how simple code and functions can be used profitably in an actuarial context. The authors' engaging and pragmatic approach, balancing rigour and intuition and developed over many years of teaching the subject, makes this book ideal for self-study or for students taking courses in risk modelling.

Natural disasters such as large-scale flooding are on the increase. Climate change directly affects our basis of existence. This includes residential buildings, and commercial and industrial properties. The author highlights the requirements that will have to be met by a protection system for buildings in the future. Insurance against natural hazards lies at the heart of such a system. The insurance systems of Germany, France, Spain, Switzerland and the USA are presented. The author explains what type of insurance system is best suited to meet the challenge of climate change. The starting point of the legal section is statutory insurance with a monopoly. The question of whether such insurance is compatible with Swiss and EU law is examined. Keywords in this respect are economic freedom, competition, services of general interest and universal service.

professional-standards-review organizations (PSRO) in defining quality of care for the Medicare program; it is a "shared responsibility of health professionals and government to provide a reasonable basis for confidence that action will be taken, both to assess whether services meet professionally recognized standards and to correct any deficiencies that may be found" (p. 14). Similar pronouncements have been made for the quality assurance activities of the Department of Defense's CHAMPUS program and of the 1980s successor to the PSROs, the federally designated peer-review organizations (PROs), established to ensure quality and utilization-efficient care for Medicare. Links between the federal and state gov ernments and between professional associations and private review entities have been developed to make this "shared responsibility" manifest in the delivery and reimbursement of health services. This responsibility is seen in light of both pro fessional and legal accountability, a view noted by Gibson and Singhas (1978) and Alger (1980). Accountability, then, becomes a concentric concept that elaborates on the pure view of quality and reflects the federal government's consumer protection activities during the 1970s. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH), which has pro vided another primary historical leadership role in defining quality assurance, has promoted the evolution of the concept of resource limitations as a part of the defini tion of quality assurance.

Health Insurance aims at filling a gap in actuarial literature, attempting to solve the frequent misunderstanding in regards to both the purpose and the contents of health insurance products (and 'protection products', more generally) on the one hand, and the relevant actuarial structures on the other. In order to cover the basic principles regarding health insurance techniques, the first few chapters in this book are mainly devoted to the need for health insurance and a description of insurance products in this area (sickness insurance, accident insurance, critical illness covers, income protection, long-term care insurance, health-related benefits as riders to life insurance policies). An introduction to general actuarial and risk-management issues follows. Basic actuarial models are presented for sickness insurance and income protection (i.e. disability annuities). Several numerical examples help the reader understand the main features of pricing and reserving in the health insurance area. A short introduction to actuarial models for long-term care insurance products is also provided. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students in actuarial sciences; graduate students in economics, business and finance; and professionals and technicians operating in insurance and pension areas will find this book of benefit.

Backward stochastic differential equations with jumps can be used to solve problems in both finance and insurance. Part I of this book presents the theory of BSDEs with Lipschitz generators driven by a Brownian motion and a compensated random measure, with an emphasis on those generated by step processes and Levy processes. It discusses key results and techniques (including numerical algorithms) for BSDEs with jumps and studies filtration-consistent nonlinear expectations and g-expectations. Part I also focuses on the mathematical tools and proofs which are crucial for understanding the theory. Part II investigates actuarial and financial applications of BSDEs with jumps. It considers a general financial and insurance model and deals with pricing and hedging of insurance equity-linked claims and asset-liability management problems. It additionally investigates perfect hedging, superhedging, quadratic optimization, utility maximization, indifference pricing, ambiguity risk minimization, no-good-deal pricing and dynamic risk measures. Part III presents some other useful classes of BSDEs and their applications. This book will make BSDEs more accessible to those who are interested in applying these equations to actuarial and financial problems. It will be beneficial to students and researchers in mathematical finance, risk measures, portfolio optimization as well as actuarial practitioners.

This book presents a market-consistent valuation framework for implicit embedded options in life insurance contracts. This framework is used to perform an empirical analysis based on more than 110,000 actual and in-force life insurance policies and with a focus on the modeling of interest rates. Its results are the answer to the central question posed in the objectives: What value do the embedded options and guarantees considered have? This question is answered both absolutely and relative to the current policy reserves, from the perspective of the insurer, the policyholder and the shareholder respectively

Changes in production processes reflect the technological advances permeat ing our products and services. U. S. industry is modernizing and automating. In parallel, direct labor is fading as the primary cost driver while engineering and technology related cost elements loom ever larger. Traditional, labor-based ap proaches to estimating costs are losing their relevance. Old methods require aug mentation with new estimating tools and techniques that capture the emerging environment. This volume represents one of many responses to this challenge by the cost analysis profession. The Institute of Cost Analysis (lCA) is dedicated to improving the effective ness of cost and price analysis and enhancing the professional competence of its members. We encourage and promote exchange of research findings and appli cations between the academic community and cost professionals in industry and government. The 1990 National Meeting in Los Angeles, jointly spo sored by ICA and the National Estimating Society (NES), provides such a forum. Presen tations will focus on new and improved tools and techniques of cost analysis. This volume is the second in a series. The first was produced in conjunction with the 1989 National Meeting of ICA/NES in Washington, D.C. The articles in this volume, all refereed, were selected from about 100 submitted for presen tation at the Los Angeles meeting."