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In recent years, insurance against natural disasters has gained recognition as an important tool for climate risk management that could, if carefully implemented, help increase the resilience of those insured. In response, insurance solutions are increasingly tested and applied in many countries that have no prior experience with insurance or no existing market. This paper analyzes the status, types, and patterns of market-based disaster insurance schemes across emerging and developing countries in Asia. We provide a snapshot of the current use of insurance based on data from Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment's Disaster Risk Transfer Scheme Database (2012-2018). Our analysis shows that although the use of insurance is expanding, there are many countries that still don't have any kind of cover available. Where insurance mechanisms exist, they often rely on subsidies or bundling strategies. Although a mix of insurance schemes covering risks for governments (sovereign); or at meso (risk aggregators, cooperatives); and micro level currently operate to address a wide variety of climate and disaster risks, without demand-side support, many markets are likely to collapse or, at the very least, experience far lower penetration rates. We conclude with a discussion of the role of these insurance schemes in increasing resilience, which raises important questions for designing new and measuring and evaluating existing insurance schemes.

Private placement life insurance (PPLI) was once the exclusive domain of wealthy investors willing to tackle the logistical challenges of the offshore insurance market. The investment portfolio, tax, and estate-planning applications, and ongoing investment potential of these policies made the effort worthwhile. In recent years, though, a number of U.S.-based insurance companies have developed similar policies that meet all U.S. insurance, investment, and tax regulations. PPLI is becoming a fundamental component of effective tax, trust, and estate planning, but few sources have been available t

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ("PPACA"), access to medical care will sharply increase. But the new law will do little to reign in the rapidly increasing cost of medical care in the United States. Regulatory controls on prices or benefits, favored by some on the left, are political non-starters in today's environment. Consumer directed health care ("CDHC") proposals, which seek to provide patients with financial incentives to equate marginal costs and benefits at the point of treatment and is favored by many on the right, is infeasible because of the skewed distribution of health care expenses and patient bounded rationality. New approaches are desperately needed. This article proposes a government-facilitated but market-based approach to improvingefficiency in the market for medical care that I call "relative value health insurance." The approach would enable even boundedly-rational patients to contract for the efficientlevel of health care services ex ante through their health insurance purchase decisions.The key to facilitating efficient contracting by boundedly-rational consumers is thecreative use of comparative effectiveness research ("CER"), which the PPACA funds at a significant level for the first time. CER should be used to create public ratings ofmedical treatments on a scale of 1-10 based on their relative value, taking into accountcosts and expected benefits. These relative value ratings would enable consumers tocontract with insurers for different levels of medical care at different prices, reflecting different cost-quality tradeoffs. After situating the concept of relative value health insurance within the context of ahealth insurance system that encourages overuse of resources and CDHC proposals that cannot mitigate the problem, the article describes the considerable benefits of relativevalue health insurance and considers some of the formidable obstacles to making it areality.

Abstract
In this paper, a general framework is built up to model the dynamic of consumer health plan choice and individual health insurance market competition. A primary goal is to identify driving forces to individual health insurance equilibrium market coverage and premium. In the baseline model, we introduce plan quality information search cost as an additional determinant to consumer's plan choice. Health insurers compete under the Hotelling's game theory framework. Equilibrium solutions of the baseline model highlight the importance of budget limit and information search cost to health plan enrollment. The more important objective is to examine the impact of market entrants on equilibrium insurance market coverage and plan prices. In the model with market entry, we add an additional dimension to the baseline model. Equilibrium solutions and numerical studies show positive impact of higher insurance market coverage and lower health plan prices. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) brought multiple unprecedented changes to the health insurance market and provided opportunities to study market dynamics and driving forces. The ACA health insurance exchange market experience shows consistency with our model findings even at the early stage of implementation. More importantly, market observations suggest that entry barriers of claim costs and information search cost are high for entrants.

Engineering Solutions to America's Healthcare Challenges covers the technologies, systems, and processes that are emerging in hospitals, clinics, community centers, universities, and the White House to repair healthcare in the United States. Focusing on the importance of individuals being proactive about their own state of health, it presents a systems approach to changing the way healthcare professionals do business and take care of their patients. Written by a leading government and private sector consultant with more than a decade of experience as an industrial engineer, the book features interviews with leading industry experts, both domestic and international. Describing how industrial engineering practices are shaping healthcare, it explains why systems thinking must be the foundation for every aspect of healthcare. The book presents proven Lean and Six Sigma tools that can help any healthcare organization begin making operational improvements that result in a better quality of care for patients--all while reducing and even eliminating the waste of time, money, and human resources. These solutions include implementing Six Sigma in emergency rooms, 5S in accounting for medical inventory, using Theory of Constraints to form a plan for shortening the length of stay in hospitals, how informatics are used to aggregate and benchmark sensitive data, and design of experiments to recruit and retain the best healthcare talent. The book illustrates the most common factors involved with successful Six Sigma projects in healthcare organizations and considers the implications of a rapidly growing medical tourism industry. It addresses the role of insurance on healthcare improvement and also previews some of the most fascinating technological advances currently in development. It also offers examples and analysis of The Institute of Medicine's six aims for healthcare: safety, effectiveness, efficiency, timeliness, family-centered focus, and equity.

An indispensable survival guide for high-net-worth individuals and their advisorsIf you're like most high-net-worth individuals nowadays, you are underinsured, over-targeted in litigation, and dangerously exposed to risks that can profoundly jeopardize your lifestyle and rob you and your family of what they've worked so hard to achieve. Don't risk it all for lack of basic knowledge. Read Wealth Exposedand get the practical guidance and real-world solutions you need to protect your hard-earned assets.Written by a leading national risk management expert with extensive experience advising high-net-worth individuals, Wealth Exposedalerts you to the full range of risks to which high-net-worth individuals are exposed, while schooling you in your risk management ABCs. Designed for high-net-worth individuals, their CPAs, attorneys, family office managers, and others, Wealth Exposedarms you with the knowledge and tools you need to protect yourself, or your clients, from mayhem.Provides a framework for creating a comprehensive personal risk management strategyContains numerous real-life anecdotes and case studies drawn from the author's case filesDiscusses insurance solutions for property, cars, jewelry, aircraft, watercraft, wine, cars, and moreRead Wealth Exposedand find out what you need to know to protect your assets from risk and secure your peace of mind.

The focus of this book is on the two major areas of risk theory: aggregate claims distributions and ruin theory. For aggregate claims distributions, detailed descriptions are given of recursive techniques that can be used in the individual and collective risk models. For the collective model, the book discusses different classes of counting distribution, and presents recursion schemes for probability functions and moments. For the individual model, the book illustrates the three most commonly applied techniques. Beyond the classical topics in ruin theory, this new edition features an expanded section covering time of ruin problems, GerberShiu functions, and the application of De Vylder approximations. Suitable for a first course in insurance risk theory and extensively classroom tested, the book is accessible to readers with a solid understanding of basic probability. Numerous worked examples are included and each chapter concludes with exercises for which complete solutions are provided

This paper presents the private agency's view of the service-delivery dilemma of funding versus placement decisions. It focuses on three program areas to highlight this dilemma: 1) Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) disincentives to competitive placement, 2) the private agency's role when the educational system falls short, and 3) supported employment.