I am happy to announce that our paper entitled “Semi-Markov modeling for cancer insurance” has been accepted for publication in the European Actuarial Journal (Soetewey et al. 2022).

Advancements in medicine and biostatistics have already resulted in a better access to insurance for people diagnosed with cancer. This materializes into the “right to be forgotten” adopted in several EU member states, granting access to insurance after a waiting period of at most 10 years starting at the end of the successful therapeutic protocol.

This paper concentrates on insurance covers on a market where such a right has been implemented. Stand-alone products are considered, as well as guarantees included as a rider in an existing package. The cost of offering standard premium rates to all applicants in mortgage insurance related to property loans is also evaluated.

The 3-state (healthy—ill—dead) Semi-Markov hierarchical model developed in Denuit et al. (2019) for long-term care insurance is adopted here for actuarial calculations. Semi-Markov transition intensities are estimated from cancer cases recorded by the Belgian Cancer Registry. The obtained results suggest that a new offer could develop, targeting the particular needs of cancer patients.

Read more here.

Note that this paper is written jointly with Prof. Legrand and Prof. Denuit—my PhD supervisors at UCLouvain—and Dr. Silversmit from the Belgian Cancer Registry.

Thanks for reading.

I hope this paper will, to some extent, be helpful for your research.

As always, if you have any question related to the topic covered in this paper, please add it as a comment so other readers can benefit from the discussion.