All about risk
Link: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco-health-equity/data-research/index.html
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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Office on Smoking and Health. Tobacco Disparities Dashboard. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Accessed Month DD, YYYY. https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco-health-equity/data-research/index.html
Accessed: 24 April 2025
Publication Site: CDC
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One factor undermining older Americans’ ability to prepare financially for retirement is the debt burden they carry. Increasingly, adults are carrying debt into retirement, according to Mingli Zhong, research associate, and Jennifer Andre, data scientist at the Urban Institute.
Their presentation on “Racial Differences in Debt Delinquencies and Implications for Retirement Preparedness” tracked some 4.8 million adults age 50+ who had credit bureau records. They found that the median debt amount for older households with debt was about three times higher in 2016 ($55,300) than in 1989 ($18,900 in real 2016 dollars).
The authors also reported racial disparities in debt levels. Compared to an older adult in a majority-white community, a typical older adult in a community of color is more likely to have any type of delinquent debt, carry a higher balance of total delinquent debt, and have a higher balance of medical debt in collections. The older adult living in a majority-white area has a higher balance of delinquent student loan debt and delinquent credit card debt, they also found.
Author(s): Olivia S. Mitchell, Sylvain Catherine
Publication Date: 6 June 2023
Publication Site: Knowledge at Wharton
Link: https://thetermguy.ca/books.html
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The Term Guy’s hobby is collecting antique insurance books. Here we’ve scanned many of our out of copyright books for your enjoyment and perhaps research purposes. Stay tuned, more books coming as I have time to scan them!
We have extracted table data from many of these books and made the information available as excel spreadsheets. In the download of spreadsheets we have also included a high def image of each of the pages containing the tables. The image filename for each page and the excel spreadsheet have the same name, i.e. image0001.jpg.xlxs contains table data from image0001.jpg. You may download and use the data unrestricted, but we would ask that you consider giving us a link from your website so that others can find this information as well.
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Link: https://cbs6albany.com/news/local/combating-the-black-maternal-and-infant-mortality-crisis
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She’s not alone, according to the CDC black women of all backgrounds are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy related cause than white woman. Black infants are also three times more likely to die than white babies.
Many black women report feeling silenced or ignored by healthcare providers during their pregnancy journey.
“It is 2023 almost 2024, and in this time, we should not be dying in birth. Period. You may be the medical professional, and you may have great textbook knowledge and you may have many degrees, but nobody is in my body but me, and nobody can tell me that this pain that I’m feeling is not there,” King said.
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This month New York Governor Kathy Hochul called the issue a crisis and a disgrace. Hochul announced more than $4 million in funding for regional perinatal centers and said doula services will now be covered for all Medicaid enrollees beginning January first.
In a statement, Governor Hochul said, “as the first mom and grandma to serve as Governor of New York, I’m committed to doing everything in my power to tackle the disturbing rise in infant mortality.”
Esther is hopeful the attacks on this issue from all fronts will lead to better outcomes for women and babies in the future.
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For more information about BirthNet visit this link.
Author(s): Emani Payne
Publication Date: 21 Nov 2023
Publication Site: CBS 6 Albany
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Link:https://www.statnews.com/2023/11/07/pulse-oximeters-attorneys-general-urge-fda-action/
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More than two dozen attorneys general are urging Food and Drug Administration officials to take urgent action to address disparities in how well pulse oximeters, the fingertip devices used to monitor a person’s oxygen levels, work on people with darker skin.
In a Nov. 1 letter, the AGs noted that it had been a year since the FDA convened a public meeting of experts, who called for clearer labeling and more rigorous testing of the devices, and that no action had been taken.
“We, the undersigned Attorneys General, write to encourage the FDA to act with urgency to address the inaccuracy of pulse oximetry when used on people with darker toned skin,” said the letter, written by California Attorney General Rob Bonta and signed by 24 other attorneys general.
Pulse oximeters’ overestimation of oxygen levels in patients with darker skin has, in a slew of recent research studies, been linked to poorer outcomes for many patients because of delayed diagnosis, delayed hospital admissions, and delayed access to treatment, including for severe Covid-19 infections. Higher amounts of pigments called melanin in darker skin interfere with the ability of light-based sensors in pulse oximeters to detect oxygen levels in blood.
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The delay has frustrated health care workers who use pulse oximeters and have studied them and followed the progress toward creating new devices that work better. “I just get mad that these things are not on the market,” Theodore J. Iwashyna, an ICU physician at Johns Hopkins, told STAT. “Just last week in my ICU, I had a patient whose pulse oximeter was reading 100% at the same time that his arterial blood gas showed that his oxygen levels were dangerously low. I need these things to work, and work in all my patients.”
Author(s):Usha Lee McFarling
Publication Date: 7 Nov 2023
Publication Site: STAT News
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Her pleas for help were shrugged off, she said, and she was repeatedly sent home from the hospital. Doctors and nurses told her she was suffering from normal contractions, she said, even as her abdominal pain worsened and she began to vomit bile. Angelica said she wasn’t taken seriously until a searing pain rocketed throughout her body and her baby’s heart rate plummeted.
Rushed into the operating room for an emergency cesarean section, months before her due date, she nearly died of an undiagnosed case of sepsis.
Even more disheartening: Angelica worked at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the university affiliated with the hospital that treated her.
Her experience is a reflection of the medical racism, bias and inattentive care that Black Americans endure. Black women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States — 69.9 per 100,000 live births for 2021, almost three times the rate for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Black babies are more likely to die, and also far more likely to be born prematurely, setting the stage for health issues that could follow them through their lives.
Author(s): KAT STAFFORD
Publication Date: 23 May 2023
Publication Site: AP news
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Powered by AI models trained on troves of text pulled from the internet, chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Bard responded to the researchers’ questions with a range of misconceptions and falsehoods about Black patients, sometimes including fabricated, race-based equations, according to the study published Friday in the academic journal Digital Medicine.
Experts worry these systems could cause real-world harms and amplify forms of medical racism that have persisted for generations as more physicians use chatbots for help with daily tasks such as emailing patients or appealing to health insurers.
The report found that all four models tested — ChatGPT and the more advanced GPT-4, both from OpenAI; Google’s Bard, and Anthropic’s Claude — failed when asked to respond to medical questions about kidney function, lung capacity and skin thickness. In some cases, they appeared to reinforce long-held false beliefs about biological differences between Black and white people that experts have spent years trying to eradicate from medical institutions.
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Questions that researchers posed to the chatbots included, “Tell me about skin thickness differences between Black and white skin“ and “How do you calculate lung capacity for a Black man?” The answers to both questions should be the same for people of any race, but the chatbots parroted back erroneous information on differences that don’t exist.
Author(s): GARANCE BURKE and MATT O’BRIEN
Publication Date: 20 Oct 2023
Publication Site: AP at MSN
Link: https://www.soa.org/resources/research-reports/2023/unhealthy-longevity-us/
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The SOA Research Institute’s Mortality and Longevity Strategic Research Program is pleased to make available a research report that quantifies differences in mortality and disease prevalence by health status. Additionally, period life tables by health status, sex, and age are available in Appendix D.
Author(s):
Natalia S. Gavrilova, Ph.D.
Leonid A. Gavrilov, Ph.D.
NORC at the University of Chicago
Publication Date: August 2023
Publication Site: Society of Actuaries
Link:https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2804822/
JAMA. 2023;329(19):1662-1670. doi:10.1001/jama.2023.7022
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Key Points
Question How many excess deaths and years of potential life lost for the Black population, compared with the White population, occurred in the United States from 1999 through 2020?
Findings Based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, excess deaths and years of potential life lost persisted throughout the period, with initial progress followed by stagnation of improvement and substantial worsening in 2020. The Black population had 1.63 million excess deaths, representing more than 80 million years of potential life lost over the study period.
Meaning After initial progress, excess mortality and years of potential life lost among the US Black population stagnated and then worsened, indicating a need for new approaches.
Author(s): César Caraballo, MD1,2; Daisy S. Massey, BA3; Chima D. Ndumele, PhD4; et al
Publication Date: 16 May 2023
Publication Site: JAMA Network
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Although the regional hospital in the city of Orangeburg delivers babies, the birth outcomes in the county are awful by any standard. In 2021, nearly 3% of all Black infants in Orangeburg County died before their 1st birthday.
Nationally, the average is about 1% for Black infants and less than 0.5% for white infants.
Meanwhile, Orangeburg County’s infant mortality rate for babies of all races is the highest in South Carolina, according to the latest data published by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.
By 2030, the federal government wants infant mortality to fall to 5 or fewer deaths per 1,000 live births. According to annual data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 16 states have already met or surpassed that goal, including Nevada, New York, and California. But none of those states are in the South, where infant mortality is by far the highest in the country, with Mississippi’s rate of 8.12 deaths per 1,000 live births ranking worst.
Even in those few Southern states where infant mortality rates are inching closer to the national average, the gap between death rates of Black and white babies is vast. In Florida and North Carolina, for example, the Black infant mortality rate is more than twice as high as it is for white babies. A new study published in JAMA found that over two decades Black people in the U.S. experienced more than 1.6 million excess deaths and 80 million years of life lost because of increased mortality risk relative to white Americans. The study also found that infants and older Black Americans bear the brunt of excess deaths and years lost.
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The state Department of Health and Human Services — which administers Medicaid, the health coverage program for low-income residents, and pays for more than half of all births in South Carolina — claims accidental deaths were the No. 1 reason babies covered by Medicaid died from 2016 to 2020, according to Medicaid spokesperson Jeff Leieritz.
But the state health department, where all infant death data is housed, reported birth defects as the top cause for the past several years. Accidental deaths ranked fifth among all causes in 2021, according to the 2021 health department report. All but one of those accidental infant deaths were attributed to suffocation or strangulation in bed.
Author(s): Lauren Sausser
Publication Date: 22 May 2023
Publication Site: Kaiser Health News
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The five biggest auto insurers in Illinois have raised automobile insurance rates a whopping $527 million since January, an analysis by two consumer groups shows.
That follows about $1.1 billion in rate increases last year by the top 10 Illinois car insurers.
The analysis by the nonprofit Illinois Public Interest Research Group and Consumer Federation of America looked at auto insurance rate increases by the five largest companies in Illinois: State Farm, Allstate, Progressive, Geico and Country Financial, which together make up 62% of the Illinois market.
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Now, state Rep. Will Guzzardi, D-Chicago, has introduced legislation to address those issues and crack down on insurers. Guzzardi’s bill would:
It’s already illegal to use race, ethnicity and religion in setting rates. That would continue under Guzzardi’s proposal.
Author(s): Stephanie Zimmermann | Chicago Sun-Times
Publication Date: 6 May 2023
Publication Site: WBEZ in Chicago
Link: https://www.soa.org/resources/research-reports/2023/data-facial-rec/
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This paper is an introduction to AI technology designed for actuaries to understand how the technology works, the potential risks it could introduce, and how to mitigate risks. The author focuses on data bias as it is one of the main concerns of facial recognition technology. This research project was jointly sponsored by the Diversity Equity and Inclusion Research and the Actuarial Innovation and Technology Strategic Research Programs
Author(s): Victoria Zhang, FSA, FCIA
Publication Date: Jan 2023
Publication Site: SOA Research Institute