My Actuarial Working Life

When I read " Everyone wants to assume that the health plans are the bad guy ", I couldn't help keep nodding my head. This interesting statement was written by David Axene (President & Consulting Actuary, Axene Health Partners) in his article " Is California leading states in health care reform? ", posted in  SoA Blog . Many people have an perception that insurance companies are the greedy devils which always look for opportunities to get excessive profits by increasing the health insurance's premium rates - but do they really complain on the increasing medical costs charged by the medical providers (like private hospitals)? They do not understand the premium increase is mainly attributed to the increase in medical costs, or they refuse to understand? "Public" here refers to those public who have bad perception on insurance companies selling health insurance Perhaps this disappointing public behaviour can be explained by the above cha...

In case you are looking for some Excel / Spreadsheet tips on how to make your templates more efficient, perhaps you can get some ideas from the tips I share below. Afraid of bombastic command or VB coding? Don't worry, the tips I share below are very simple and you don't need to be an expert to use the tips. The following tips use examples from the template I used to compile movement of policy (MOP) statistics (i.e. new business, in force business & termination/alteration) . However, you may apply the same ideas for other types of templates as well. Tips (1): Produce results by plan code level, not product group Normally, the MOP statistics are reported in specific product groups, such as "Whole Life", "Endowment", "Temporary" etc. in BNM Form L6-L8 (Conventional Insurance) / FT5-FT7 (Takaful). It is common for us to group our data by the required product groups using data processing applications (e.g. FoxPro, Data Conversion System ...

I started to learn FoxPro when I started my first actuarial career after graduating from the university. My mentor in the actuarial department, Madam L, was also my FoxPro  shifu (i.e. master / teacher / guru). Madam L was the reinsurance administrator in the department - by using FoxPro, she managed to do necessary reinsurance administration work for the entire individual life insurance business (more than 1 million policies) by her own, alone ! By going through her programs and guidances, I picked up necessary skills to use FoxPro and create FoxPro programs for my reporting and experience studies tasks (my manager resigned three month after I joined the department - all his tasks became my tasks!) - until now I am still grateful to the guidance she provided to me previously. When I was promoted to a team leader with junior staffs, similarly I needed to teach them the relevant FoxPro knowledge so that they had necessary skills to do the assigned tasks. At that time, there ...

Recently when I helped my client to set up process to compile movement of certificate statistics (MOP) (i.e. new business, in force and termination/alteration), I advised them that Excel is not an ideal tool to do such actuarial exercise which requires a lot of data manipulation. "Then what is the better tool?" They asked me. Without any hesitation, I answered: " FoxPro ". Why do I recommend FoxPro as a good tool to be used for actuarial exercises that require a lot of data manipulation & matching (such as MOP reporting, experience studies and reinsurance administration)? What are Excel, MS Access or Data Conversion System (DCS) (a supplementary application comes together with Prophet) not considered good tools for actuarial exercise? Among the reasons are: Ability to do data matching / joining - as FoxPro uses SQL (Structured Query Language) as the primary programming language, we can combine the selected fields from 2 different tables/data easily base...

During a seminar on health care reform held recently in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Health Minister Liow Tiong Lai mentioned that the government would refer to the healthcare model in Taiwan (one type of social insurance, i.e. National Health Insurance (NHI)) as one of the bases to reform Malaysian health care system. The government will develop the National Health Financing Authority (NHFA) to manage the fund under the National 1Care Health Scheme (1Care) - which is expected to be funded by government, private sector, employers and the people. Theoretically, it is a good idea to have a structured healthcare system that can provide healthcare services to all citizens in the country. In my view, expensive medical cost is one of the key financial risks that everyone should really concern on - almost everyday we can read news about unfortunate folks with serious illnesses begging the public to fund for the expensive medical costs. According to Liow, starting from 2004, the medical ...