Academy Announces Annual Volunteer and Public Service Award Recipients
The Academy announced that two distinguished members will receive its highest awards. Katie Campbell will receive the Robert J. Myers Public Service Award, which honors an actuary for a single noteworthy public service achievement or a career devoted to public service. Arnold Dicke will receive the Jarvis Farley Service Award, which honors an actuary whose volunteer efforts on behalf of the Academy have made significant contributions to the advancement of the profession.
Christian Benjaminson, Dave Heppen, Donna Megregian, and Jim Whelpley will receive the Academy’s Outstanding Volunteerism Award for their exceptional contributions in the past year. Read the Academy news release.
“Service is at the heart of the Academy’s mission,” Academy President D. Joeff Williams said. “The skill, dedication, and hard work of our volunteers is the lifeblood that enables us to produce our valuable public policy and professionalism work.”
The award recipients will be recognized at the Academy’s Annual Meeting and Public Policy Forum, which will be a virtual event this year on Nov. 5–6. Plan to join us and celebrate your peers—register today.
Capitol Forum Webinar Looks at Health Equity Issues
The Academy hosted a Capitol Forum webinar Monday, “Exploring Health Equity in a Time of COVID-19 and Beyond,” in which a panel of health equity experts spoke on drivers of health disparities and shared their insights and activities related to data and quality measurement, innovative provider and payer models designed to meet individual- and community-level medical and nonmedical needs, and opportunities for cross-sector collaboration.
Senior Health Fellow Cori Uccello, who moderated, cited the Academy’s new Health Equity Work Group, which will examine actuarial data sources and methods to assess whether they contribute to health disparities, recommend changes when appropriate, and apply an “equity lens” to the Academy’s health policy work and educate actuaries on health equity issues. She cited statistics showing that people of color have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and that prior to COVID-19 fared worse across measures of coverage, access to care, and health outcomes.
Look for more coverage in the forthcoming September Actuarial Update. Slides and audio are available free to Academy members.
PBR Boot Camp Covers a Range of Topics
More than 150 people attended the Academy’s seventh PBR Boot Camp this week, which was held for the first time as a virtual event. Presenters covered a range of aspects of specifically tailored issues relevant to the now mandated principle-based reserving (PBR) framework for life insurance, including life insurance overviews and implementation of VM-20, mortality, and additional liability assumption; overviews of PBR life insurance assets, reinsurance, and model overview and model governance; variable annuities; and regulator and auditor reviews and updates. The program included interactive Q&A sessions and updates, with attendees gaining targeted information and participating in intensive, focused discussion groups, sharing insights, and learning from others’ experience of PBR in their practice.
Webinar Looks at ASOP No. 6 Practice Note Exposure Draft
Academy volunteers gave presentations at this week’s Virtual Casualty Loss Reserve Seminar and Workshops (CLRS), jointly sponsored by the Academy and the Casualty Actuarial Society. Academy-specific content presentations included:
Al Beer gave a professionalism presentation on the Actuarial Standards Board and the Actuarial Board for Counseling and Discipline;
John Gleba and Michelle Iarkowski presented in a session on report documentation;
Volunteers including Lise Hasegawa and Brenda Hebert presented on the recently updated audit practice note; and
Committee on Property and Liability Financial Reporting Chairperson Kathy Odomorik participated in a roundtable discussion on reserving issues.
Alert
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) released its “2019 Projections Report,” a 10-year forecast of the financial condition of PBGC’s single-employer and multiemployer-plan programs, as required by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. Read the Academy alert.
Virtual Seminar on Effective P/C Loss Reserve Opinions, Dec. 9–10 and 14–15 (registration opening soon)
In the News
Subscriber-only Bloomberg Law quoted Joe Hicks, vice chairperson of the Multiemployer Plans Committee, on the PBGC’s recently released Projections Report. Hicks and Senior Pension Fellow Linda K. Stone also commented on the report in a Pension & Investments story.
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