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Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

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Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. I just don't take it seriously anymore. Track 200 factors, 200 businesses, or 200 industries and you will see 1 event per year. Track all of the above and you will see 40,000 such events in a year. More to the point, their actuarial model was probably wrong, not reality. Somewhere buried in their model were assumptions exclu…

I think the more thought-provoking question is what exactly is the Black Swan event? If only 37% of their ICU beds are used for COVID patients then why are so many more people dying right now?

It is the US so unlike most of the rest of the world even if there were a lot of surplus ICU beds most people can't afford the 100K USD with insurance or 1M USD with under-insurance or no insurance it would cost them out of pocket to receive treatment.

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve read the article - I don’t see where it specifies the cause of the reported deaths. I interpreted it as deaths caused by Covid. Do you have a reason to interpret it differently?

I don't think they provided enough information to say either way. My gut hunch is that Covid and delayed health care are involved but I don't have a guess as to what degree.

Cancer drug sales have been way down by a massive amount so that and operation per year would be one method

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#203

> "The CDC weekly death counts, which reflect the information on death certificates and so have a lag of up to eight weeks or longer, show that for the week ending Nov. 6, there were far fewer deaths from COVID-19 in Indiana compared to a year ago – 195 verses 336 – but more deaths from other causes – 1,350 versus 1,319." So last year more covid deaths (particularly among the elderly), but while those numbers have de…

Within my brothers circle of friends / former friends etc, amongst those that participate in recreational drug use, there have been a crazy number of Fentanyl related deaths. They're all between the ages of 25 - 30. I can't help but wonder how much this has an impact.

Probably a big one. Drug overdoses have killed more 18-54 year olds in Canada than Covid has.

Hell, in British Columbia there have been more drug overdoses than Covid deaths across all ages.

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#204

He says it's going to cost the company more but could there also be an increased incentive for covered employees to increase their coverage and thus increase the premium revenue to OneAmerica? I am generally dubious when the CEO of a (private) company that's bottom line is so closely tied to death rates publishes an article with such a nice round number increase in the death rate.

Would you feel more at ease if he said 38.23%?

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. I just don't take it seriously anymore. Track 200 factors, 200 businesses, or 200 industries and you will see 1 event per year. Track all of the above and you will see 40,000 such events in a year. More to the point, their actuarial model was probably wrong, not reality. Somewhere buried in their model were assumptions exclu…

I think the more thought-provoking question is what exactly is the Black Swan event? If only 37% of their ICU beds are used for COVID patients then why are so many more people dying right now?

Three years ago, 0% of ICU beds were used for COVID patients. Now it is 37%. If ICU admission correlates with risk of death, and those beds would have been empty otherwise, or used for lower risk patients, a 40% increase in deaths seems reasonable. Certainly not a rigorous analysis, but it passes the smell test.

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#206

> Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.” Do we have an actuarial crisis on our hands? We’ve seen the same thing in finance, disaster preparedness and other unrelated industries. We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. And how does it…

>We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. I just don't take it seriously anymore. Track 200 factors, 200 businesses, or 200 industries and you will see 1 event per year. Track all of the above and you will see 40,000 such events in a year. More to the point, their actuarial model was probably wrong, not reality. Somewhere buried in their model were assumptions exclu…

You can pretty much blame six sigma for these braindead once in 200 years predictions. When you beat your effecency numbers into the ground then have to explain a .000001 varianc will only happen in 200 years based on this totally detached from real world statistic model is hew you get here.

The person that sold that idea cashed out and left the company long ago.

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#207

Here's an interesting video about an increase in sports-related deaths and heart-attacks. Maybe it's related? https://rumble.com/vpnxkr-are-these-side-effects-extremely-r...

Sudden cardiac death has always been surprisingly frequent in healthy athletes, so there’s a lot of room for observational bias here.

(2016) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4969030/

> A recent estimate of SCD incidence ranged from 1 in 40,000 to 1 in 80,000 athletes per year.

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#208

This may well be true in some suitably qualified sense, but it's odd to be hearing it from an insurance company first. General population death records would enable government health agencies to catch such large statistical shifts more quickly than an insurance company. I suspect what they're seeing is real, but they're exaggerating how representative it is of all geographic regions and socioeconomic strata. Maybe th…

Working as an actuary. The only way I can make sense of this headline (GDPR block) is: normally for age X deaths Y. Of those Y there are many with health preconditions that can’t get life coverage. Now a disease hits that kills some and effects everyone (this is somewhat contrary to the usual view of corona). You can have a massive increase in deaths without preconditions even if the absolute rise is small. So their deaths are up 40% compared to the expectation of the insurer (not general mortality).

In other words: because of selection at the gate for long life you can get up to 50-70% lower premiums than the standard table assumes. So this insurer is having quite the scare.

It’s one of the reasons why many EU insurers have balanced portfolios (and are strongly favored by regulation to be balanced). Long life, short life, pensions all in a basket with reinsurance to get these risks of the books. Throw in some P&C and A&H books as well (lower incidence of traffic accidents for example) and the company could be robust to corona. Now the interest rate and inflation, that’s a different story.

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#209

> Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.” Do we have an actuarial crisis on our hands? We’ve seen the same thing in finance, disaster preparedness and other unrelated industries. We have “once in 200 years” events happening it seems far more often than once in 200 years. And how does it…

> And how does it even pass muster that a 10% increase in deaths would be a “once in 200 years” event. When has there ever been a 200 year period without major war, disease or disaster? What exactly are they smoking?

I don't know if it's a once in 200 years event or not, but this is a US insurance company, presumably talking about numbers in the US. Aside from ww2, in which the US had around 400,000 deaths, the number of Americans who have died in wars or disasters has been fairly small relatively.

Even the 400,000 for WW2 was over four years, whereas the US has had around 400,000 covid deaths a year for the last two years, and even more if you just look at excess mortality (however the population is obviously larger now than during ww2).

Re: Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that is bad math around 1/80. If the average person had a 1/80 chance to die each year, the average life expectancy would be 40 years. Think about this another way. You have a gun with 80 chambers and 1 bullet. How many times on average can you point it at your head and pull the trigger before it goes off? Would you still argue 80 times? On average it is the last chamber?

That's not how it works. For a geometric distribution with p=1/80 the mean or expected value is indeed 80. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution Your gun example has a uniform distribution between 1 and 80 with an expected value of roughly 40 if you don't spin the chamber each time between pulling the trigger. If you spin it each time, then it's again the geometric distribution and the expected value i…

I had the same initial thought, but this isn't quite a perfect model... that distribution averaging assumes that the only factor at play is covid... but there are other chances of death with highly irregular probability distributions as a function of age... with other nonlinear weightings as a function of age you could get pretty different numbers in the end...
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