The Valuation of Lifetime Health Insurance Policies with Limited Coverage

Abstract

In adopting a traditional actuarial view, insurance companies often use expected values to determine the premiums for lifetime health insurance policies with limited coverage, which can lead to serious overpricing problems when the coverage limit is not very low or very high. To address this overpricing problem, this article provides analytical solutions for fair premiums of lifetime health insurance policies with limited coverage. Using internal data provided by insurance companies, this article describes the relationship between the level of limited coverage and excess premiums. The premium difference between a practical pricing method and a proposed pricing model creates a humped curve; the maximum excess premium ratio reaches nearly 20 percent for limited coverage for younger insured people.