This year, the focus is largely on boomers and the products they need to launch a successful retirement. From advanced uses of indexed life insurance to Med Supp sales strategies, these are the topics your peers placed at the top of their knowledge wish lists.
In 2012, Dr. Nir Krakauer, an assistant professor of civil engineering in CCNY's Grove School of Engineering, and his father, Dr. Jesse Krakauer, MD, developed a new method to quantify the risk specifically associated with abdominal obesity.
Back in the 1990s, Pan says big data spawned by the business intelligence movement created a metrics-driven culture. Now companies are returning to data, especially predictive analytics data, in order to achieve business goals. However, Pan says the metrics aren’t always used properly.
A new screening technology reveals a signature of mortality in blood samples. Researchers have identified four biomarkers that help to identify people at high risk of dying from any disease within the next five years.
Life insurance companies didn’t exactly find themselves straining to keep up with a huge influx of applications for individual coverage in 2013. In fact, application activity for individually underwritten life insurance in the U.S. fell by 3.4 percent compared with 2012, according to the MIB Life Index 2013 Annual Report.
Disruptive innovations redefine the competitive landscape of an industry. Disruptors look for new ways to compete by ignoring commonly held beliefs about consumer preferences. The insurance industry’s reputation for strength and stability may create a perception that innovation is unnecessary, but this is simply not true. Disruptive innovations are necessary to sustain that strength and stability into the future.
Life insurance sales are flat, so what’s a life carrier to do? Why not bundle other products onto the life platform? That’s exactly what some carriers have done: adding critical illness, long-term care and disability riders onto the basic policy.
It may be surprising to some people that in 2011 19% of US adults were current cigarette smokers. This represented about 43.8 million adults, which is still a large number. However, it’s a great improvement since 1964, when the first Surgeon General’s report was released. At that time roughly 42% of US adults were cigarette smokers. Smoking peaked for men in the 1970s and for women in the 1980s. We have seen a great reduction in the number of smokers since those decades, though the rate of decline has slowed down in recent years.
They’re everywhere now—on the front of retail counters to all over the internet. E-cigarettes are advertised as the safer, more socially acceptable and convenient alternative to smoking. The use of e-cigarettes has increased not only among smokers but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also notes their greatly increased use by school-age children who were previously non-smokers.
So how “healthy” are e-cigarettes, and do they pose a risk similar to traditional smoking?
In this white paper, RGA experts discuss how new technologies are being used and what insurers can do to balance the risks and opportunities brought about by technological change.
The tragic skiing accident of Formula 1 racing champion Michael Schumacher increased the awareness of severe traumatic brain injury, which is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide.
A controversy remains brewing over whether e-cigarettes should be regulated as a tobacco product or considered as a “drug delivery device.” Part of the argument is based on science and public health concerns, but much of the argument, as one might guess, actually revolves around money.
