Social Security vs In-Vitro Fertilization

Here is a very interesting case (from foxnews.com) regarding the rights to survivor's benefits of a child, conceived via in-vitro fertilization after the father's death.



Advances in medical and other sciences will continue to provoke the emergence of fascinating, complicated, and important issues in the risk and insurance area.



- Rick

Hurricane Irene (2)

An article from yesterday's (Thursday's) Wall Street Journal, about the potential impact of Irene on east coast state-run insurance programs. The dynamic between private insurers and regulators / state-run insurers - and the potential for non-coastal policyholders to have to subsidize coastal ones - could be significantly affected, and bears watching.



- Rick

Hurricane Irene

As Irene approaches the east coast of the United States, there are a number of potential risk management and insurance implications. Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal blog site about the increased trading of catastrophe bonds over the last few days.



- Rick

Medical Malpractice

Here's a New York Times article summarizing a paper from the New England Journal of Medicine on medical malpractice. The focus of the paper is largely on the frequency of malpractice claims against doctors in a variety of medical specialties.



One thing that the paper does not appear to address is a big issue in medical malpractice: the costs of defending claims (the "loss adjustment expense" in insurance terminology). Thus, even though, as the paper finds, most claims do not result in indemnity payments to the claimant, there are often huge legal costs expended in defending against such claims.



- Rick

Are Birth Rates an Economic Casualty?

Here's a report from the Centers for Disease Control, observing the fairly significant decline in birth rates over the last few years (since 2007). Note the short-term time series chart at the bottom of the document. Is this a result of the recent financial downturn?



Here's a long-term chart of birth rates, which also shows periods of economic recession (thanks to www.calculatedriskblog.com ).



Digging deeper into the cause / correlation would make for an interesting student project.



- Rick