Steve, I'm not an insurance company employee. I'm an electrical engineer, like you. I'm copying (below) a post I just made on your Newsletter Substack because I want to increase the odds you see it. I think it is important information that you appear to be missing based upon your statements regarding the news about the 40% increase in ACEM. If I'm wrong, please accept my apology - but I want to make sure your engagement with the insurance related data has the full picture. Below is my post repeated:
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Steve, you are missing some critical pieces of data and therefore your picture on this is not completely accurate. I will try to succinctly explain and provide links to the CDC data.
The website below (USMortality.com) provides a graphing interface to CDC data. On that page, at the top, "All-Cause Excess Mortality", select "FILTER" and filter to shown only age 25-44. This age group reveals the issue I want to raise with you: The All-Cause Excess Mortality (ACEM) in this group started in March 2020 right after the pandemic started. The chart will reveal that ACEM was ~30% over baseline from March 2020 until July 2021 when the vaccines were deployed to that age group. At that point the ACEM jumps to 80% over baseline. The jump to 80% over baseline is a prime candidate to attribute to the vaccines, but I think it is essential to understand the cause behind the 30% ACEM for the 15 prior months. The ACEM CANNOT be explained by COVID, which is only 33% of the total ACEM!
I believe what I'm explaining holds true for all of the age groups, but is most pronounced in the 25-44 group. Even more so in the 35-44 group, so I'll constrain my analysis to that for now. CDC data [links provided below] shows that in this age group, in the 4 years from 2016-2019, the total deaths went from 78k to 83k - an average increase of 1.25k deaths per year. In 2020 it went to 104.5k, an increase of 21.5k in one year. COVID deaths in that age group in 2020 were < 7k. Influenza and pneumonia deaths were 3k. Therefore, non-COVID ACEM was 2X the COVID deaths! We had 7k COVID deaths and 14.5k NON-COVID deaths above baseline.
While the likely vaccine-caused deaths are the most important - and a larger number, proper analysis demands this increase in ACEM be addressed. It probably should be subtracted from the ACEM during the vaccination roll-out period, and we need to make sure that what caused the pre-roll-out ACEM is not causing the post-roll-out ACEM.
These links provide the CDC data in PDF for death by year and by age. Use the third page of the PDF:
On this page, see "Comorbidities and other conditions" (Table 3), where you can see a breakdown of Cause of Death by age group and this can be viewed by month or year. The data can also be downloaded for analysis in your favorite software tools.
Find "What are the death rates for the 10 leading causes of death?"
The CDC claims: "Suicide dropped from the list of 10 leading causes in 2020. Causes of death are ranked according to number of deaths (1). The 10 leading causes accounted for 74.1% of all deaths in the United States in 2020." (So we can rule out suicide as the cause of the excess).
The ACEM seems to be well spread out over the list of diseases - but perhaps deeper analysis will show a particular cause. This might be evidence supporting epidemiologists claiming the lockdowns do more harm than good. We know routine screening & treatment for disease has been impacted and that can be a possible cause. At least, this is likely evidence that the lockdowns & measures forced upon us are not saving lives! More are being lost due to the measures than are being lost to COVID.
I'm not insurance directly but a PEO. When employees die, they have to be "terminated" in the system and final wages and benefits paid. Lots of rules and regulations around this, so data has to be accurate. After reading your article, I just had to see if the data played out. Sure enough, there has been a steady increase in the "termination because of death" count with a dramatic difference between Q1 '19 vs Q1 '21.
Nothing to do with the insurance business but beyond horrified by yesterday's news from the CEO of the OneAmerica insurance company. Sadly, not surprised. Thanks for doing this, Steve.
Hi all, I want to comment after reading William Ward’s astute observations. It is my belief that “Covid-19” as we call it was actually rolled out sometime in early, say Spring of 2019 at the latest, possibly even earlier. I remember being very sick, I had all the Covid-19 symptoms—it was different than a flu, for sure. I could barely breathe and actually got sleep deprived because for a time I was afraid I would not be able to continue breathing if I fell asleep. I literally had to focus on breathing. Taste and smell affected, etc. I very nearly called 911, but I finally felt I was safe and allowed sleep to come. Few months later the same thing happened to my daughter and granddaughter. Her husband and their other daughter were unaffected. They were both very sick, I heard their symptoms and reminded her of my sickness and said I thought it was the same thing. Then in fall 2019–remember the “vaping sickness” hysteria? I find the timing of that odd as well. Lots of people being hospitalized with respiratory and other Covid-19 type symptoms. It was supposedly a specific brand of vape, yet that “outbreak” was all geographically close like a virus. No change to vaping laws? I don’t know how this hypothesis could be proved. Just things that make you go hmmm...
They aren’t responding because they either know the information you published is taken out of context or they don’t want their information taken out of context, as has been done to Davison.
The actuaries have been on this since the beginning. This is not news to them. The 40% rise in mortality is not among healthy individuals, as was implied by the subhead.
The rise in mortality is closer to 30% for group life across the industry. Some companies have it worse than others. But this isn’t for Q4. This is total increase since before the pandemic.
It’s also not affecting the individual life insurance market, which is conveniently glossed over in all these articles because Narrative™️.
Group life and disability is not medically underwritten like individual policies are. It skews toward folks who otherwise cannot get individual insurance policies (i.e. sick people), which invites adverse risk selection.
It’s easy to see those people freaking out about the kung flu and buying more disability and life coverage, especially when an out-of-control media keeps pushing the fear porn down everyone’s throats.
So the story behind the story is really that unhealthy and sick people are seeing a spike in mortality rates. That’s not good. It will prob kill the group benefits market.
Meanwhile, the rise in mortality in the individual market is low to non-existent. Cost of insurance is flat or declining industrywide. This is born out by the falling one year term rates.
Again, some insurers undoubtedly take more risk than others and perhaps there is a company out there that is seeing a spike in mortality in their individual lines. But those would be outliers. The industry trend is falling COIs, and a small increase in excess mortality, nothing catastrophic. Maybe this changes in the future. But this is how it looks right now.
I guess this does show a data point though, suggesting healthy folks are fairly well protected against death. Sick folks? Not so much.
You should expand your request to all actuaries, not just working at insurance companies, but also pension and health actuaries at consulting firms. They have access to morbidity/mortality experience for employee pension and group health plans for the population you're interested in.
Insurers are required to report their reserves to states’ guarantee associations that they’re licensed in. The guarantee associations function as “insolvency insurance” for insurers, to make sure they have resources to pay claims. More claims = lower reserves.
Compare the guarantee association life insurers reserve reports and claims paid numbers from 2019, 2020 and 2021 (when released) I bet you’re going to find an increase in claims paid/reserves depleted despite the market remaining steady. Probably a bump in 2022 too, as boosters and it takes time for bigger policies to pay.
I’m in PA, but FL reports are pretty clear. It seems like you could compare the years columns on “claims paid” and adjust for covid deaths and population increases to see what the excess death payouts actually are.
We know accidents/injuries (my new dept after leaving healthcare) went way down in 2020, and haven’t bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, so that can be eliminated as a cause of any increase.
My guess is the actuaries, institutional investors and auditors are provided with far more detailed info and data aggregates than peons like me. This seems like a reasonable place to start though.
Steve, can you create for your database developer audience here a list of disease categories you think will show the greatest spikes? If you have specific Diagnostic codes to chase for categories, add that. What age brackets make the most sense for the Diagnostic codes. Of the Disease Categories taken from a Powerpoint of the DMED story (from Renz's website), I hear that Pulmonary Embolism is a very worthwhile chase. But based on the firsthand chases I know have been done with health insurance claim data at companies where I know some database analysts, I'm not hearing of anything greater than 25% increase per capita comparing 2021 vs 2018 (Since many think Covid actually arrived in November of 2019 in CA, I'm feeling 2018 is a better comparison year, and as long as you compare per capita per age bracket, it is still good. I don't know of any firsthand health insurance database showing per capita per age bracket disease category spikes above 25% but perhaps we're not looking granular enough or in the wrong direction. I am not saying this spike I noticed occurred at my health insurance company, I have made friends among many programmers who have gone on to work at other health insurance companies, so I'm intimate with those who can look at data at about 5 of the largest insurance companies.
Steve, please use internationally intelligible date format, EG 2022-01-03 (yyyy-mm-dd, the ISO 8601 standard), and, ideally, 24-hour time INCLUDING OFFSET FROM UTC (EG 14:00 UTC-8).
Thanks, from a non-American living outside America.
See if you can get anything from LIMRA . They have a lot of data. Not sure if you will be able to access directly if you are not in the industry, but if you find some who is and has a UI/ PW....
We don't have the information you're requesting. I was just terminated from BCBSM for refusing the vaccine even though I requested a religious exemption.
Steve, I'm not an insurance company employee. I'm an electrical engineer, like you. I'm copying (below) a post I just made on your Newsletter Substack because I want to increase the odds you see it. I think it is important information that you appear to be missing based upon your statements regarding the news about the 40% increase in ACEM. If I'm wrong, please accept my apology - but I want to make sure your engagement with the insurance related data has the full picture. Below is my post repeated:
------------
Steve, you are missing some critical pieces of data and therefore your picture on this is not completely accurate. I will try to succinctly explain and provide links to the CDC data.
The website below (USMortality.com) provides a graphing interface to CDC data. On that page, at the top, "All-Cause Excess Mortality", select "FILTER" and filter to shown only age 25-44. This age group reveals the issue I want to raise with you: The All-Cause Excess Mortality (ACEM) in this group started in March 2020 right after the pandemic started. The chart will reveal that ACEM was ~30% over baseline from March 2020 until July 2021 when the vaccines were deployed to that age group. At that point the ACEM jumps to 80% over baseline. The jump to 80% over baseline is a prime candidate to attribute to the vaccines, but I think it is essential to understand the cause behind the 30% ACEM for the 15 prior months. The ACEM CANNOT be explained by COVID, which is only 33% of the total ACEM!
https://www.usmortality.com/excess-percent
I believe what I'm explaining holds true for all of the age groups, but is most pronounced in the 25-44 group. Even more so in the 35-44 group, so I'll constrain my analysis to that for now. CDC data [links provided below] shows that in this age group, in the 4 years from 2016-2019, the total deaths went from 78k to 83k - an average increase of 1.25k deaths per year. In 2020 it went to 104.5k, an increase of 21.5k in one year. COVID deaths in that age group in 2020 were < 7k. Influenza and pneumonia deaths were 3k. Therefore, non-COVID ACEM was 2X the COVID deaths! We had 7k COVID deaths and 14.5k NON-COVID deaths above baseline.
While the likely vaccine-caused deaths are the most important - and a larger number, proper analysis demands this increase in ACEM be addressed. It probably should be subtracted from the ACEM during the vaccination roll-out period, and we need to make sure that what caused the pre-roll-out ACEM is not causing the post-roll-out ACEM.
These links provide the CDC data in PDF for death by year and by age. Use the third page of the PDF:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db427-tables.pdf#3
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db395-tables-508.pdf#page=3
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db355_tables-508.pdf#page=3
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db328_tables-508.pdf#3
On this page, see "Comorbidities and other conditions" (Table 3), where you can see a breakdown of Cause of Death by age group and this can be viewed by month or year. The data can also be downloaded for analysis in your favorite software tools.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
For Suicide I found this CDC page:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db427.htm
Find "What are the death rates for the 10 leading causes of death?"
The CDC claims: "Suicide dropped from the list of 10 leading causes in 2020. Causes of death are ranked according to number of deaths (1). The 10 leading causes accounted for 74.1% of all deaths in the United States in 2020." (So we can rule out suicide as the cause of the excess).
The ACEM seems to be well spread out over the list of diseases - but perhaps deeper analysis will show a particular cause. This might be evidence supporting epidemiologists claiming the lockdowns do more harm than good. We know routine screening & treatment for disease has been impacted and that can be a possible cause. At least, this is likely evidence that the lockdowns & measures forced upon us are not saving lives! More are being lost due to the measures than are being lost to COVID.
I'm not insurance directly but a PEO. When employees die, they have to be "terminated" in the system and final wages and benefits paid. Lots of rules and regulations around this, so data has to be accurate. After reading your article, I just had to see if the data played out. Sure enough, there has been a steady increase in the "termination because of death" count with a dramatic difference between Q1 '19 vs Q1 '21.
Likely we are all just lurkers.
Nothing to do with the insurance business but beyond horrified by yesterday's news from the CEO of the OneAmerica insurance company. Sadly, not surprised. Thanks for doing this, Steve.
Lurking...
Hi all, I want to comment after reading William Ward’s astute observations. It is my belief that “Covid-19” as we call it was actually rolled out sometime in early, say Spring of 2019 at the latest, possibly even earlier. I remember being very sick, I had all the Covid-19 symptoms—it was different than a flu, for sure. I could barely breathe and actually got sleep deprived because for a time I was afraid I would not be able to continue breathing if I fell asleep. I literally had to focus on breathing. Taste and smell affected, etc. I very nearly called 911, but I finally felt I was safe and allowed sleep to come. Few months later the same thing happened to my daughter and granddaughter. Her husband and their other daughter were unaffected. They were both very sick, I heard their symptoms and reminded her of my sickness and said I thought it was the same thing. Then in fall 2019–remember the “vaping sickness” hysteria? I find the timing of that odd as well. Lots of people being hospitalized with respiratory and other Covid-19 type symptoms. It was supposedly a specific brand of vape, yet that “outbreak” was all geographically close like a virus. No change to vaping laws? I don’t know how this hypothesis could be proved. Just things that make you go hmmm...
They aren’t responding because they either know the information you published is taken out of context or they don’t want their information taken out of context, as has been done to Davison.
The actuaries have been on this since the beginning. This is not news to them. The 40% rise in mortality is not among healthy individuals, as was implied by the subhead.
The rise in mortality is closer to 30% for group life across the industry. Some companies have it worse than others. But this isn’t for Q4. This is total increase since before the pandemic.
It’s also not affecting the individual life insurance market, which is conveniently glossed over in all these articles because Narrative™️.
Group life and disability is not medically underwritten like individual policies are. It skews toward folks who otherwise cannot get individual insurance policies (i.e. sick people), which invites adverse risk selection.
It’s easy to see those people freaking out about the kung flu and buying more disability and life coverage, especially when an out-of-control media keeps pushing the fear porn down everyone’s throats.
So the story behind the story is really that unhealthy and sick people are seeing a spike in mortality rates. That’s not good. It will prob kill the group benefits market.
Meanwhile, the rise in mortality in the individual market is low to non-existent. Cost of insurance is flat or declining industrywide. This is born out by the falling one year term rates.
Again, some insurers undoubtedly take more risk than others and perhaps there is a company out there that is seeing a spike in mortality in their individual lines. But those would be outliers. The industry trend is falling COIs, and a small increase in excess mortality, nothing catastrophic. Maybe this changes in the future. But this is how it looks right now.
I guess this does show a data point though, suggesting healthy folks are fairly well protected against death. Sick folks? Not so much.
You should expand your request to all actuaries, not just working at insurance companies, but also pension and health actuaries at consulting firms. They have access to morbidity/mortality experience for employee pension and group health plans for the population you're interested in.
Insurers are required to report their reserves to states’ guarantee associations that they’re licensed in. The guarantee associations function as “insolvency insurance” for insurers, to make sure they have resources to pay claims. More claims = lower reserves.
Compare the guarantee association life insurers reserve reports and claims paid numbers from 2019, 2020 and 2021 (when released) I bet you’re going to find an increase in claims paid/reserves depleted despite the market remaining steady. Probably a bump in 2022 too, as boosters and it takes time for bigger policies to pay.
I’m in PA, but FL reports are pretty clear. It seems like you could compare the years columns on “claims paid” and adjust for covid deaths and population increases to see what the excess death payouts actually are.
We know accidents/injuries (my new dept after leaving healthcare) went way down in 2020, and haven’t bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, so that can be eliminated as a cause of any increase.
My guess is the actuaries, institutional investors and auditors are provided with far more detailed info and data aggregates than peons like me. This seems like a reasonable place to start though.
https://figafacts.com/reports/
Where is the RootClaim bet at?
Steve, can you create for your database developer audience here a list of disease categories you think will show the greatest spikes? If you have specific Diagnostic codes to chase for categories, add that. What age brackets make the most sense for the Diagnostic codes. Of the Disease Categories taken from a Powerpoint of the DMED story (from Renz's website), I hear that Pulmonary Embolism is a very worthwhile chase. But based on the firsthand chases I know have been done with health insurance claim data at companies where I know some database analysts, I'm not hearing of anything greater than 25% increase per capita comparing 2021 vs 2018 (Since many think Covid actually arrived in November of 2019 in CA, I'm feeling 2018 is a better comparison year, and as long as you compare per capita per age bracket, it is still good. I don't know of any firsthand health insurance database showing per capita per age bracket disease category spikes above 25% but perhaps we're not looking granular enough or in the wrong direction. I am not saying this spike I noticed occurred at my health insurance company, I have made friends among many programmers who have gone on to work at other health insurance companies, so I'm intimate with those who can look at data at about 5 of the largest insurance companies.
Steve, please use internationally intelligible date format, EG 2022-01-03 (yyyy-mm-dd, the ISO 8601 standard), and, ideally, 24-hour time INCLUDING OFFSET FROM UTC (EG 14:00 UTC-8).
Thanks, from a non-American living outside America.
Check out rga investor presentation. Uk and canada at high end of claim estimates. US largest and no end in sight for q122.
http://reinsurancegroupofamericainc.gcs-web.com/
See if you can get anything from LIMRA . They have a lot of data. Not sure if you will be able to access directly if you are not in the industry, but if you find some who is and has a UI/ PW....
We don't have the information you're requesting. I was just terminated from BCBSM for refusing the vaccine even though I requested a religious exemption.