Estimating the Impact of the Medical Loss Ratio Rule: A State-by-State Analysis

Outlines the healthcare reform law's requirement that insurers spend a minimum ratio of 80 to 85 percent of premiums on medical care expenses or rebate the difference to policy holders. Estimates rebates in each state if it had been in effect in 2010

Insurers' Responses to Regulation of Medical Loss Ratios

The Affordable Care Act's medical loss ratio (MLR) rule requires health insurers to pay out at least 80 percent of premiums for medical claims and quality improvement, as opposed to administrative costs and profits. This issue brief examines whether insurers have reduced administrative costs and profit margins in response to the new MLR rule. In 2011, the first year under the rule, insurers reduced administrative costs nationally, with the greatest decrease -- over $785 million -- occurring in the large-group market. Small-group and individual markets decreased their administrative costs by about$200 million each. In the individual market, insurers passed these savings on to consumers by reducing their profits even more than administrative costs. But in the large- and smallgroup markets, lower administrative costs were offset by increased profits of a similar amount. Stronger measures may be needed if consumers are to benefit from reduced overhead costs in the group insurance markets

How Has the Affordable Care Act Affected Health Insurers' Financial Performance?

Starting in 2014, the Affordable Care Act transformed the market for individual health insurance by changing how insurance is sold and by subsidizing coverage for millions of new purchasers. Insurers, who had no previous experience under these market conditions, competed actively but faced uncertainty in how to price their products. This issue brief uses newly available data to understand how health insurers fared financially during the ACA's first year of full reforms. Overall, health insurers' financial performance began to show some strain in 2014, but the ACA's reinsurance program substantially buffered the negative effects for most insurers. Although a quarter of insurers did substantially worse than others, experience under the new market rules could improve the accuracy of pricing decisions in subsequent years

Asymptotic Lattices, Good Labellings, and the Rotation Number for Quantum Integrable Systems

This article introduces the notion of good labellings for asymptotic lattices in order to study joint spectra of quantum integrable systems from the point of view of inverse spectral theory. As an application, we consider a new spectral quantity for a quantum integrable system, the quantum rotation number. In the case of two degrees of freedom, we obtain a constructive algorithm for the detection of appropriate labellings for joint eigenvalues, which we use to prove that, in the semiclassical limit, the quantum rotation number can be calculated on a joint spectrum in a robust way, and converges to the well-known classical rotation number. The general results are applied to the semitoric case where formulas become particularly natural

Reply to Comment by Galapon on 'Almost-periodic time observables for bound quantum systems'

In a recent paper [1] (also at http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0803.3721), I made several critical remarks on a 'Hermitian time operator' proposed by Galapon [2] (also at http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0111061). Galapon has correctly pointed out that remarks pertaining to 'denseness' of the commutator domain are wrong [3]. However, the other remarks still apply, and it is further noted that a given quantum system can be a member of this domain only at a set of times of total measure zero.Comment: 3 page