Summary |
This edition devotes entire chapters to the tax treatment of life and health insurance, to estate planning, to retirement planning, and to the business uses of life and health insurance. We recognize that these areas change continuously, but exposure to the topics is important to students and practitioners.
The chapters on health care have been significantly revised to reflect the growth of managed care and its impact on traditional health care programs. The rapidly aging U.S. population has moved insurer emphasis from protection to retirement products and focused the national debate over the future of Social Security and Medicare. All of these trends are reflected in this edition.
Life insurer management and the environment within which it operates are dealt with in the later chapters of the book. The entry of banks into the life and health insurance field has opened a new major distribution system. These and other developments reflect the strong movement toward eliminating the traditional barriers among commercial banks, investment banks and insurers. The chapter on marketing life and health insurance reflects both the search for and the experiment with new distribution systems, including the growing impact of the Internet.
This edition provides a major effort to employ finance theory and concepts in understanding the management of risks by life and health insurers.
|
