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For an annuity issuer, the equivalent of a catastrophic death-rate improvement hurricane might be a 6% drop in the death rate for its annuitants in a single year.
A long-term longevity risk nightmare could be seeing the annuitants' death rate improve by an annualized level of about 1.6% per year over a 20-year period.
The typical rate of death-rate improvement could be about 1% per year.
(Related: 10 Worst States for Death-Rate Improvement)
The Longevity Risk Task Force, an arm of the American Academy of Actuaries (AAA), has included those glimpses of how Americans' death rates typically change over time in an analysis of Social Security beneficiary mortality data for the period from 1940 through 2013.
The AAA Longevity Risk Task Force is developing and testing a model regulators can use to improve the way insurers build annuity longevity risk into their risk-based capital (RBC) ratios.
An RBC ratio is a rough indicator that insurers, regulators, investors, customers and life insurance agents can use to estimate how well an insurer has prepared itself to deliver the insurance benefits and other benefits it has promised to provide.
The Longevity Risk Task Force put the Social Security death-rate improvement chart in a slidedeck for the Life Risk-Based Capital Working Group, an arm of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
The Longevity Risk Task Force plans to brief the NAIC working group on the death-rate analysis project on Saturday, in Indianapolis, at an in-person session the working group has scheduled for the NAIC's spring national meeting.
Links to copies of working group session documents and other resources are available here.
The Longevity Risk Task Force Field Study
To most people, the idea of living longer than expected sounds great.
