The CareerCast ranking of the best and worst jobs in America, picked up by the WSJ, has been bouncing around the Internet recently. I wondered why actuary was rated so high – I dunno, I figure a job that uses difficult math to abstract death sounds slightly less stressful than working on a bomb squad – until I read this from Progress Illinois:
Will men see their insurance rates jump if health care reforms passes this year? That’s what Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois claims. In what they are calling a “detailed actuarial analysis,” the insurance giant estimates that premiums for younger, healthier men in the individual and small group markets would increase 119 percent under the proposals that have passed both chambers.
It shouldn’t have been a revelation, I suppose, that an expanding health care industry would require an army of well-compensated actuaries, but I am a blogger of very little brain. Still, there was something about the methodology that irked me.