Many Americans believe that people who lack health insurance somehow get the care they really need. Care Without Coverage examines the real consequences for adults who lack health insurance. The study presents findings in the areas of prevention and screening, cancer, chronic illness, hospital-based care, and general health status. The committee looked at the consequences of being uninsured for people suffering from cancer, diabetes, HIV infection and AIDS, heart and kidney disease, mental illness, traumatic injuries, and heart attacks. It focused on the roughly 30 million-one in seven-working-age Americans without health insurance. This group does not include the population over 65 that is covered by Medicare or the nearly 10 million children who are uninsured in this country. The main findings of the report are that working-age Americans without health insurance are more likely to receive too little medical care and receive it too late; be sicker and die sooner; and receive poorer care when they are in the hospital, even for acute situations like a motor vehicle crash.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

A comprehensive guide to investment guarantees in equity-linked life insurance Due to the convergence of financial and insurance markets, new forms of investment guarantees are emerging which require financial service professionals to become savvier in modeling and risk management. With chapters that discuss stock return models, dynamic hedging, risk measures, Markov Chain Monte Carlo estimation, and much more, this one-stop reference contains the valuable insights and proven techniques that will allow readers to better understand the theory and practice of investment guarantees and equity-linked insurance policies. Mary Hardy, PhD (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo and is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and an Associate of the Society of Actuaries, where she is a frequent speaker. Her research covers topics in life insurance solvency and risk management, with particular emphasis on equity-linked insurance. Hardy is an Associate Editor of the North American Actuarial Journal and the ASTIN Bulletin and is a Deputy Editor of the British Actuarial Journal.