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

The Mouse Strikes Again

According to the Kaiser Health News, some hospitals have been hiring Disney as a consultant to help improve their customer/patient satisfaction. Could be some potential linkage to actuarial and risk management issues - "quality of service" is likely related, to some extent, to effectiveness of treatment.

The references toward the end of the article to some pushback against paying to send hospital staff members to Disney for training is interesting...

- Rick

Public Pensions

Per an article in The Economist, it's good to see that someone (the city of Atlanta) has made progress in the public pension underfunding area...

- Rick

Health Insurance

A very interesting posting by Richard Posner, who is a justice on the federal 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and a professor at the University of Chicago. He has largely defined the field of law and economics over the last few decades.

The posting is overall very interesting, but particularly note the following quote:

Third-party payment is a pervasive feature of American medicine. Why anyone should want health insurance other than “major medical”—that is, insurance against catastrophic medical bills—is a great mystery, as is the fact that Medicare subsidizes routine health care of upper-middle-class people. Since disease and injury tend to be unpredictable, health insurance smooths costs over time, which is efficient, but a person could achieve that smoothing simply by saving the money that he now pays in health-insurance premiums and investing it to create a fund out of which to pay future health expenses as they occur.

But we are stuck with third-party payment, and it systematically favors specialists over primary-care physicians, because specialists tend to provide discrete procedures, which are easier for the insurers, whether they are private insurance companies or government, to cost. The care provided by primary-care physicians has, to an extent, an elastic and discretionary quality.

It would be interesting to see how our actuarial science and insurance
students would respond to this.

- Rick

WC in Illinois

I know it's hard to believe that my home state of Illinois might be the site of possibly fraudulent activity... Here's an editorial from today's Champaign News-Gazette regarding a Workers Compensation situation that some are apparently suspecting to be questionable.

- Rick

Births, Marriages, and Divorces

A NY Times report on a National Center for Health Statistics study indicates that U.S. birth, marriage, and divorce rates all fell slightly during 2009. The 100-year births-per-year graphic is nice - for example, one can see what happens to the birth rate during recessionary or expansionary periods.

- Rick

Cost of Motor Vehicle Crash Injuries

A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as reported in Insurance Journal, finds that the annual medical care and productivity costs associated with motor vehicle crash injuries totals over $99 billion, or nearly $500 per licensed U.S. driver.

- Rick