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Guys sorry yeah I’m in the wrong thread— I took LPM. I don’t think there is an LPM thread active for November unfortunately so got this one confused. Sorry.
A few thoughts on the exam yesterday:
can’t believe they made us to do an entire FAS97 SOE. The source reading literally didn’t even put a formula for it in the book, they just described it and hinted at at how you would solve for it. I hate to say but I worked so hard on those FAS60 SOEs, the different variance views etc, and I failed to commit the FAS97 one to memory. Just too bad. I also got tripped up because the question was worded like “your manager would like to see a different view, show SOE to show what they can expect”— I searched long and hard for an “expected” basis in the problem to compare the actuals to until I finally realized they just meant do the SOE with the actual numbers.
They had back to back questions basically asking “is reinsurer capital better than traditional life insurance capital. I don’t see anything in the source reading talking about whether reinsurer capital in general is “better” or “worse” (weird word choice too).
I don’t remember a 5 step mortality table flow chart? I mean I know there were steps for creating mortality table but I thought it added up to like 9 steps and where was the “flow chart” exactly?
It’s worrying me that only one other person had an issue w/ number of policies on the reinsurance question. That was worth a lot of points and I was hoping they were throw the question out due erroneously not supplying enough info.
Agreed the wording on the TWR question was weird. They seemed to say “calculate the TWR using the annual MWR with the LIRR method” … that made no sense…. I think they meant to say “calculate the TWR and also calculate the LIRR using the annual MWR (since they then tell us to compare 2 calculations.
My biggest gripe was on the reinsurance question I could not for the life of me find any info in the problem that allowed us to figure out the number of policies there were. They gave a number of things in terms of expense per policy but I could not figure out how many policies there were, they only mentioned how much face there was (would’ve thought they’d also include “face per policy” to figure out the number of policies. Unless I totally was missing something.
Again: very much appreciate your responses! You are definitely right about anti-selection w/ this product and the importance therefore of marketing/distribution.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find any Limited Underwriting tables aside from the one from the 2008 VBT :-/ So I can’t compare different eras.
We do account for anti-selection in our mortality assumption. We have seen the phenomenon in our actual experience and have baked it into our qx assumption. Now, I’ll admit: I don’t know if I fully grasp your concept of anti-selectors overwhelming mortality improvement (but I would definitely like to understand your thinking on that). Wouldn’t the anti-selectors themselves also experience mortality improvement, even in the early years, or am I missing thinking about something? I mean, GI buyers are definitely the worst of the worst in terms of their general health compared to the rest of the population– hence why they can’t get underwritten for a fully underwritten (or even simplified issue) policy and have to buy GI. But couldn’t we say that even the people today in poor health are still likely to live longer than individuals who were in poor health, say, 30 years ago? And wouldn’t that indicate improvement? My point being: couldn’t we say basically “a rising tide lifts all boats” in the field of medical advancement? Or is that an incorrect assumption?
It just occurred to me: it might be worth it to look at what the majority CODs for our GI policies and then research and see if the average lifespan for those specific conditions has increased at all over the years. What do you think of that? (Similar to you I’m definitely just spit-balling here of course.)
Whenever I think of mortality improvement, I think of medical advancement. It seems, possibly, people who buy GI are more likely to have chronic illnesses and chronic conditions in general, and advancements in medicine typically target treating and/or curing common illnesses/conditions, so that’s why I was thinking GI people might benefit more from medical advancements than the average person. Maybe: am I missing an aspect of mortality improvement other than medical advancement that is key to this discussion?
Now thinking about it, I also am thinking that, because these are low-income individuals mostly, and individuals needing greater-than-average medical attention, the age 65+ issue ages (and issue ages close to 65) might benefit relatively more from Medicare (and SS) than the under-65 group (the difference relative to other products and the general population that is).
We do have a high first-year lapse rate by the way (~38%) and we do mostly sell through Brokerage, although we do have good monitoring in place with the goal of getting rid of the agents that sell business with the worst mortality and even worst lapse experience.
Much of this post is just me thinking out loud, and I definitely appreciate any insights you may have in any way/shape/form. That said, my main question I think was: why do you think the anti-selection would overwhelm any mortality improvement? If we account for anti-selection in our qx assumption, why couldn’t we also assume that poor-health anti-selectors would be subject to mortality improvement in the same way the rest of the population is (even in early years)? What am I missing here?
Really appreciate your response. You make some great points about there being so many possibilities for variation with GIWL mortality improvement. That’s a good idea about looking at Limited Underwriting tables from different eras and comparing.
One follow-up question regarding your statement here:
“Maybe you could reflect meaningful improvements in the (far) out years, but probably not so much in the early years.”
Are you referring to reflecting meaningful improvements over-and-above the improvement assumption we’d have for fully underwritten business, or no? I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but just wanted to clarify. When you say “probably not so much in the early years,” it sounds like you’re saying you might expect little-to-no mortality improvement in early years for GIWL at all. Do you perhaps have a hunch or reason to believe the GI population isn’t subject to any of the mortality improvement experienced by the general population and fully underwritten population?
Speaking of which… a thought I had was: for lack of more information, I was trying to think of a way to use the mortality improvement table developed by the SOA based on U.S. population mortality :
https://www.soa.org/resources/experience-studies/2020/mortality-improvement-scale-mp-2020/
This SOA table shows lower mortality improvement for older ages in general than the table developed by my company (the one from my company being based on fully underwritten business). At the very least this does seem to prove that less underwriting means less mortality improvement, though I don’t know how linear that relationship is… but maybe there’s something I can do with these two tables.
The other thing that makes this tricky is mortality improvement tables (both from the SOA and the one developed by my company) are typically calendar-year tables, but of course anti-selection is a phenomenon related to policy-year.
