Study: Health overhaul to raise claims cost 32 pct

[TexasTowelie]

16. I'm an insurance statistician

and I'll be quite frank when I say actuaries are not the geniuses that everyone would believe. I worked on tort reform in Texas and although I was considered to be at the bottom of the chain of people involved with the project, I often would make a suggestion of potential cost savings that none of the actuaries had ever considered. The reasons why I could make those suggestions was because I knew where information could be located and also because of my familiarity with the data compared to the limited knowledge that the actuaries possessed.

I can also attest that of the actuaries which I worked with both in the public and private sectors, the actuaries in the public sector had superior knowledge and technical skills than those in the private sector. Therefore, I wouldn't put a lot of faith in the numbers that a group of insurance actuaries would use as a prediction--you would probably have better luck at the horse racing track. Considering that most of them track towards a Republican political philosophy, I wouldn't be surprised if they failed to include some of the mitigating effects of Obamacare in their analysis.