In my last post I made the statement that I had seen a certain pattern again and again in pension reports. That recurring event was a decline in the active workforce levels from 2020 to 2021 … that was then followed by a marked surge in hiring. I gave just two examples in that previous post, Virginia and Tennessee. I said that I could provide more examples all day, but left it there.

Well, I was doubting myself a little bit this morning and decided to go look at a few more locations, just to see if I had overstated my case. The first one that randomly popped into my head was Rhode Island.

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Employees’ Retirement System of Rhode Island

2025 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report

For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2025

Page 175

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Not exactly what we saw in Virginia and Tennessee, eh? There is a dip in the member pool between 2020 and 2021 for sure. BUT, I would not call the next years following that an aggressive hiring surge.

Okay. Kinda a half and half there. That’s fine. With these sorts of things it is good to show that there is a spectrum.

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On to the next.

The state of Minnesota came into mind, and I have not been there for some time now.

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Minnesota State Retirement System

Annual Comprehensive Financial Report

For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2025

Page 198

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Now this is more in line with my examples in that last post. There is a definite reduction in numbers from 2020 to 2021 … AND the hiring that followed is pronounced.

A little more credence.

*(we will come back to this Minnesota document before we are done. I found some stuff in this excursion that I was not expecting, but we will look at that at the end of this post.)

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Let’s get further out west for the next one. How about Nevada?

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PUBLIC EMPLOYEES’ RETIREMENT SYSTEM OF NEVADA

ANNUAL COMPREHENSIVE FINANCIAL REPORT

For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2025

Page 103

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This is a classic example of what we have been talking about. That is a pretty big dip from 2020 to 2021 there. And adding roughly about 14,000 new active employees since 2021 is a very healthy rebound.

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Mississippi?

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PERS of MISSISSIPPI

2025 ANNUAL COMPREHENSIVE FINANCIAL REPORT

Fiscal Year Ended June 30

Page 122

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I wanted to go ahead with this one to show that I am not cherry-picking. This is pretty much not showing my assertion. It looks to me that the active members here, unlike the other examples, had been in a decline well before the pandemic. To be fair, the dip from 2020 to 2021 here is more substantial than the previous yearly reductions on this table … about 4,000. But obviously there is no hefty replacement that follows. It is stagnant.

There you go. I will show you all cases.

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Going to California, again.

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CalPERS

Annual Comprehensive Financial Report

Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2025

Page 156

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Now we are talking. That is a big drop off from 2020 to 2021. And just look at the rebound! Almost 100,000 new active members were added from 2021 to 2024!

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So … it’s a thing. At least in a lot of places ~ but not everywhere.

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Now what about that other stuff I said I wanted to show you from Minnesota?

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Well I was scanning the document for those active member counts when I came across this:

Page 189

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Let’s just put that into a list:

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Minnesota State Retirement System ~ Health Care Reimbursements

2016 … $71,541,000

2017 … $74,686,000

2018 … $79,448,000

2019 … $84,976,000

2020 … $87,488,000

2021 … $94,664,000

2022 … $106,361,000

2023 … $109,158,000

2024 … $108,974,000

2025 … $121,717,000

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That 7 million dollar jump from 2020 to 2021 is to be expected. But what about that almost 12 million dollar leap in the following year, 2021 to 2022? Ok, we probably should also expect that.

BUT why is the biggest of all … in 2025?

Almost 13 million dollars bigger than 2024!

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What on earth is dragging down Minnesotans health to this degree?

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I am going to tell you a story.

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Once upon a time there were too many expensive people in the country. The leaders knew this was only going to get worse over time, so they came up with a plan. In a nutshell, they found a way to make large swathes of these costly folks “disappear.” Now many of these that “ceased to be there” were old. They just sat around counting their pennies that they had saved. But there was also a good deal of people that “had to be removed” who were actually still working jobs. The leaders had to find a way to replace them after they were no longer there … ideally, the new workers would cost less and keep their mouths shut.

The End.

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And now, some fragments from the real world:

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The graph above is from the Virginia Retirement System. It is showing you a dip in the active member pool that happened from 2020 to 2021, then that was followed by an aggressive hiring frenzy.

And by the way, this is another of those “bath tub” situations - we are only seeing the end result in those figures, the net. There could have been plenty of water dropping down the drain at the same time the tub was filling up 2022 to 2025. That 4,000 worker lower level in 2021 was just the more obvious evidence we could see of the exits before they completely opened up the in spigot. That is my opinion anyway. And I will tell you that I have seen this exact pattern many times in the pension reports when looking at the active member pool fluctuations during the pandemic. I am going to just pick one at random … first one that comes to mind … Tennessee.

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TENNESSEE CONSOLIDATED RETIREMENT SYSTEM

A Program of the Tennessee Treasury Department |

A Component Unit of the State of Tennessee

Annual Comprehensive Financial Report

For the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2024

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Page 108 (ACTIVE MEMBERS Fiscal Years 2015-2024)

A little closer:

The arrow is pointing at 2020.

Just like Virginia, we have a little dip down into 2021 followed by some serious hiring.

*not sure what the unusual large first number on the list is about, could be a system change, I have not investigated.

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We could keep going with that all day, but take my word for it okay? That is a common pattern. I really did pull Tennessee out of a hat there … Scout’s Honor.

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That graph is the key takeaway from an exchange I had with one of my research assistants. I was asking them to tell me about the massive influx of border crossings into the US during the pandemic.

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You remember that right?

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ABC News

December 13, 2022

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Well, right now that is all I am going to throw at you about that particular matter. If you are a glutton for punishment, I have dumped the lion’s share of that exchange I had with the assistant about this in the Supplemental section at the end of this post.

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Next I am going to go somewhere that we have not been to before. I am going to rip off Ed Dowd and look at some Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total BLS.

How the hell did I even get the idea to do that?

I was reading ZeroHedge this morning:

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That article started me thinking … if there are big negative numbers in job growth (just look at the graph for 2024 and 2025!) … could that be another signal in official employment data of the health harms caused by a certain magic elixir?

Hmmm.

So for a good chunk of my day I have been playing with the BLS website and various datasets to see if my theory had any credibility.

As I say, I am doing nothing new here, Ed Dowd has been on this beat forever.

I am not going to lie, I am still learning how to navigate the BLS databases. There are many avenues to try there. But I may have stumbled into a couple of useful alleyways in my first trip.

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First off let’s look at something called BED or Business Employment Dynamics.

With this dataset I am just going to look at the entire country and try to ascertain how many jobs were added or removed net from year to year. I had to do this the old fashioned way because all we have to go with are separate lists for “Gross Job Gains” and “Gross Job Losses” …

… that’s right, one minus the other.

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Here are the quarterly gains:

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And the quarterly losses:

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Now here is where I had the research assistant help me out with some calculations. I wanted to know how the average net gains or losses for the pre-pandemic years of 2015 to 2019 stacked up with the following years. 2020 was such a whacky year (just take a look at the Qtr2 losses for 2020!) … it was left out.

Here is what we came up with:

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“ … There’s an especially interesting feature in 2023: the average is pulled up by Q1’s +1.026M, while Q2 and Q3 show a substantial deceleration, with Q3 actually negative. BLS’s published data likewise show Q3 2023 at −192K net employment change and Q4 at +344K in the version of the data released at the time. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

So I’d characterize 2023 as a transition year rather than simply “normal.” It started relatively strong, but by the second half, the gross-gains/gross-losses spread had narrowed dramatically … “

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I hope that makes sense. This BLS data seems to reinforce the notion that there was a serious hiring surge underway in 2021 and 2022 ~ deep in the heart of the pandemic. 2021 stands out, it saw over 300% the normal rate of gains compared to the 2015-2019 average.

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But then we have to ask … why has that now evaporated? Why are the most recent years not even matching the 2015-2019 levels?

2025 is a mere 17% of that.

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Safe and effective magic elixir?

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Shhhhhh!

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Anything but vaccines … ABV.

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Before I am done here, I am going to throw one more fragment at you. There is another little closet at the BLS site that stores something called JOLTS or Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.

*Oh and I should say that the portal I am using is the one called “One Screen” - (that is also what I used to look at the BED data).

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In this JOLTS data we can choose a lot more factors, even multiples in the same category. But for now I am going to stick with all government job openings. The nice thing here is that it will give us some monthly statistics instead of quarterly.

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Okay what are we looking at here? What I am trying to show you is that government job openings were pretty stable, rising gently a bit from 2105 to 2019. Even 2020 was nothing special in this respect. It wasn’t until a few months into 2021 that we start to see a definite signal of elevated job openings. Remember that these are numbers in the thousands. By the end of 2021 we have broken the million plateau … doubling the numbers that were seen in 2016. This possibly troubling trend reached its apex in the summer of 2022, when July had 1,225,000 government job openings. Thankfully the trend has been steadily receding since that peak. But I will point out that even the most recent 2026 numbers are generally larger than the pre-pandemic norms.

I will tell you that we can look at other job categories and find the same thing. The numbers seem to show a “switch” gets flipped in the early months of 2021, followed by a steady rise in the job openings that peak in the summer of 2022 and then begin to ebb.

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One more example … Health Care.

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Look familiar? July of 2022 is not the absolute largest month for health care job openings in this table, but it was the second biggest next to March of 2022. In fact, 2022 for the health care sector was almost exclusively in the 2 million or more range for job openings. Again, double the norm that we see in 2016.

But really this is the exact same thing we just saw in the government jobs.

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What could have jump started all these job openings in the first months of 2021?

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Beat the dead horse, play the broken record …

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Naw, couldn’t be that.

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Sorry for the hot mess here. But heck, you will probably only look at this post once - if I am lucky, that is.

It is really just another file in my archive for me to come back to later. Maybe I will have to remember something a few months or a year from now and this thing will jog my memory and help me go a little bit further with my mania.

But enough of that talk.

What is the big picture here?

Are you saying csofand, that the would be puppet masters of the world had a plan to take out a bunch of pensioners and highly paid long-time employees only to replace them with illegal immigrants? Are you implying, if true, that these recent transplants would be the beneficiaries of the unstoppable wave of DEI hiring and promotions that this same pandemic period was the culmination of? And are you in that swirl of conjecture hinting that these same newly arrived folk would be quiet as mice when they assumed the positions that were recently vacated?

csofand?

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Supplemental

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“I know that there was a good deal of discussion about illegal immigration on the southern US border a few years ago. Do you have the numbers from credible sources for 2019 to 2024?”

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Yes. The most credible and consistent source is U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), using its Southwest Land Border enforcement statistics. One important caveat: “encounters” are not the same thing as the number of unique people who illegally entered the country. An encounter can be an apprehension, an inadmissible person encountered at a port of entry, or—in the pandemic period—a Title 42 expulsion. Some people were encountered more than once. DHS specifically warns that repeat encounters substantially affect the totals. UU.S. Customs and Border Protection+1

Southwest border encounters, FY2019–FY2024

Fiscal yearSouthwest border encountersApprox. change from prior year20191,148,024—2020458,088−60.1%20211,734,686+278.7%20222,378,944+37.1%20232,475,669+4.1%20242,135,005−13.8%

These are fiscal years (October 1 through September 30), not calendar years. The 2021–2024 figures are CBP Border Patrol encounters at the Southwest land border. CBP’s underlying statistics distinguish Border Patrol apprehensions from Office of Field Operations encounters at ports of entry.

For perspective, 2019 was already a relatively high year: Border Patrol recorded 851,508 encounters between ports of entry, while the broader Southwest-border figure including encounters at ports of entry was about 1.15 million. DHS’s historical data show the 2019 Border Patrol figure at 851,508.

Southwest border encounters, FY2019–FY2024

CBP Southwest border encounter totals by federal fiscal year. Encounters are not unique people.

Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection; DHS Office of Immigration Statistics.

What the numbers actually tell us

There are a few important things I’d keep separate if you’re trying to understand the immigration debate rather than simply quote a headline number.

1. The big increase began in 2021.
The Southwest-border encounter count went from roughly 458,000 in FY2020 to 1.73 million in FY2021, then reached about 2.38 million in 2022 and 2.48 million in 2023. FY2024 declined to about 2.14 million.

2. “Encounter” does not mean “successfully entered the U.S.”
For example, an apprehension by Border Patrol is an encounter even though the person was stopped. Similarly, a person presenting at a port of entry and being found inadmissible is counted in CBP’s broader encounter statistics. During March 2020–May 2023, Title 42 expulsions were also included. UU.S. Customs and Border Protection+1

3. Repeat encounters matter.
This is particularly important after 2020. DHS’s Office of Immigration Statistics found that repeat encounters accounted for a much larger share during the Title 42 period. For FY2021, for example, DHS estimated 1.14 million unique people among roughly 1.72 million enforcement encounters. OOHSS

4. FY2023 was the peak of this six-year period, not FY2024.
The 2024 number was about 14% lower than 2023, although it remained almost twice the 2019 total if you’re comparing the same Southwest-border encounter measure. CBP reported that encounters subsequently fell sharply in the middle of 2024 following the June 2024 executive actions.

One terminology issue worth emphasizing

If by “illegal immigration” you mean people who actually entered and remained in the United States illegally, these numbers aren’t sufficient to answer that question. There isn’t a simple annual government count of “illegal immigrants who entered and stayed.”

A much more useful analysis would separate at least four things:

• Border Patrol apprehensions — people intercepted between ports of entry.

• CBP encounters/inadmissibles at ports of entry — a different category.

• Title 42 expulsions and Title 8 removals/returns — what happened to people after being encountered.

• Gotaways — people Border Patrol believes crossed without being apprehended, which are estimated rather than directly counted.

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“So we cannot have any reliable estimates for the entries into the US in this period?

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Yes—but with an important distinction. We can produce credible estimates of unlawful entries, but we cannot know the exact number. In fact, DHS has explicitly attempted to estimate “successful unlawful entries,” rather than simply treating encounters as entries.

The best measure: apprehensions + estimated “gotaways”

For people crossing between ports of entry, there are three relevant categories:

• Apprehensions: Border Patrol actually intercepts the person.

• Gotaways: Border Patrol detects evidence of a crossing but does not apprehend the person.

• Undetected crossings: People who successfully cross without Border Patrol detecting them. This is the fundamentally unknowable component.

DHS’s Office of Immigration Statistics has actually developed a statistical methodology for estimating total successful unlawful entries, using apprehension data and estimates of the probability that a person gets detected/apprehended. DHS describes this as an estimate, with significant methodological limitations. OOHSS

For FY2019, for example, DHS estimated approximately 135,000 successful unlawful entries between ports of entry. That is very different from the roughly 851,000 Border Patrol apprehensions that year.

The other particularly useful measure is gotaways. DHS recorded approximately:

Fiscal yearObserved/estimated gotaways

2019~150,000

2020—

2021~389,000

2022>600,000

2023~695,000

The DHS Inspector General cautions that these are observational estimates, not a complete count: some people evade detection altogether.

So, for 2023, for example, Border Patrol reported 2.85 million detected illegal entries, of which it apprehended about 2.15 million and classified about 695,000 as gotaways. DDepartment of Homeland Security

But there’s an important complication

Even “gotaways” aren’t the same as total illegal entries.

Imagine 100 people cross:

• Border Patrol catches 70 → 70 apprehensions.

• Cameras/agents detect 20 but don’t catch them → 20 gotaways.

• 10 aren’t detected at all → invisible to the statistics.

We would observe 90 people, but there were actually 100 successful crossings.

That’s why DHS explicitly says the gotaway figure “is not a comprehensive measure of successful unlawful entries.” OOHSS

And there is another complication in 2021–2023: repeat crossings. A person expelled under Title 42 could attempt to cross again and be counted again. DHS found that in 2022 there were about 2.341 million Southwest Border encounters but 1.742 million unique individuals.

So what can we responsibly say?

I’d characterize the evidence this way:

We have very good numbers for people encountered by CBP, reasonably good observational estimates for people who got through despite detection, and much less certain statistical estimates for people who crossed completely undetected.

Consequently, saying:

“There were X million illegal immigrants who entered the United States from Mexico in 2021–2024”

would imply a level of precision that the government data don’t support.

But saying:

“There were X million CBP encounters, approximately Y gotaways, and DHS estimates Z successful unlawful entries”

is a much more defensible statement.

And there’s actually enough DHS data to do something quite interesting: we can reconstruct a reasonable range for successful unlawful entries for each year from 2019 through 2024, separating apprehended, gotaway, and estimated undetectedcrossings. That would be a much better answer to your original question than the headline encounter numbers.

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“Can you do that for me?”

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Yes. I dug further into the DHS methodology, and I want to make one correction/qualification to my earlier answer: there is a reasonably good official estimate through 2021, but DHS did not publish comparable model-based estimates for 2022–2024. So for those later years, we can construct estimates, but we should label them as estimates rather than official DHS counts.

The cleanest way to present this is to distinguish “successful unlawful entries between ports of entry” from encounters.

Best available estimates, FY2019–FY2024

Fiscal year … Border Patrol apprehensions. Estimated successful entries without apprehension. Estimated total crossings.* Confidence.

2019 … 851,508 ~135,000 ~987,000 High

2020 … 400,651 ~200,000 ~601,000 High/moderate

2021 … 1,659,206 ~660,000 ~2.32 million Moderate

2022 … 2,206,436 ~880,000†~3.09 million† Low/moderate

2023 … ~2,045,838 ~815,000†~2.86 million† Low/moderate

2024 … ~1.53 million ~270,000‡ ~1.80 million‡ Low/moderate

* “Total crossings” here means Border Patrol apprehensions + successful entries without apprehension. It is not the number of unique people; one individual can cross multiple times.

† My estimate, not an official DHS published estimate. I applied the DHS 2021 estimated apprehension rate to the subsequent Border Patrol apprehension totals. I’ll explain this below.

‡ The 2024 figure is based on a newer CBO-derived estimate of entries without inspection, rather than the older DHS model. Brookings reports that CBO’s estimate for 2024 is approximately 270,000.

2019: about 135,000 successful unlawful entries

This is the strongest number in the series.

DHS’s Office of Immigration Statistics estimated 135,000 successful unlawful entriesbetween ports of entry in FY2019. Its methodology was based on its Repeated Trials Model, which estimates the probability that attempted crossers are apprehended. DHS also estimated about 151,000 observed gotaways that year. OOHSS

That distinction is interesting: the 135,000 figure is DHS’s model estimate of allsuccessful unlawful entries, whereas the ~151,000 gotaways were the people Border Patrol actually observed but failed to apprehend. DHS explicitly cautioned that the two measures aren’t directly interchangeable. OOHSS

2020: about 200,000

DHS’s subsequent Border Security Metrics Report estimated approximately 200,000 successful unlawful entries in FY2020. That’s a major increase over the 135,000 estimate for 2019, but still extremely low by historical standards. DHS estimated that successful unlawful entries had fallen roughly 91% from their 2000 level by 2020.

COVID and the associated border restrictions make 2020 something of an oddball year, so I wouldn’t use it as a normal baseline.

2021: about 660,000

This is probably the most important number for understanding the 2021–24 controversy.

DHS estimated approximately 660,000 people successfully crossed without being apprehended in FY2021. The agency said this was substantially above the roughly 160,000/year seen during 2014–2020, but still well below the levels estimated for the early 2000s.

Border Patrol had 1,659,206 apprehensions that year.

So:

1.659 million apprehended + 0.660 million successful entries = approximately 2.32 million attempted crossings that resulted in either apprehension or successful entry.

That’s a much more meaningful number than simply saying “1.66 million people entered illegally.”

And there’s an important wrinkle: DHS found substantial repeat crossing during the Title 42 period. 36% of encounters during the Title 42 period were repeat encounters, compared with 14% in the pre-Title-42 period. Consequently, 1.66 million apprehensions did not represent 1.66 million different people.

What about 2022 and 2023?

This is where we have to be more careful.

DHS’s own 2022 Border Security Metrics Report says that it was working on a new modeling approach to estimate total illicit entries, but it did not yet have a comparable estimate for those years. The agency was developing an agent-based simulation that could estimate both detected and undetected crossings. OOHSS

So I would not present a number like 880,000 for 2022 as though DHS had measured it.

However, we can make a transparent statistical estimate.

DHS’s 2021 numbers imply an apprehension rate of roughly:

1.659 million / (1.659 million + 660,000) ≈ 71.5%

If we provisionally assume that same 71.5% apprehension rate:

• FY2022: 2.206 million apprehensions → roughly 880,000 successful entries

• FY2023: 2.046 million apprehensions → roughly 815,000 successful entries

Those are model-derived extrapolations, not DHS figures.

And there’s good reason to be cautious: the apprehension rate can change considerably with changes in geography, nationality, technology, enforcement policy, asylum policy, and migrant behavior.

2024 is particularly interesting

For 2024 we have a newer independent estimate.

Brookings reports that the Congressional Budget Office estimated roughly 270,000 entries without inspection in 2024. Brookings considers that estimate reasonable.

That’s dramatically lower than the extrapolated 2022–23 figures.

And it makes sense given what happened during 2024. Border Patrol encounters fell sharply after the June 2024 executive action; CBP reported that June encounters between ports of entry fell 29% from May and were the lowest since January 2021.

So I would not try to force the 2024 number into the same DHS model as 2019–21. The methodology and migration environment changed.

The picture that emerges

If we graph the estimated successful crossings without apprehension, rather than encounters:

Estimated successful unlawful entries, FY2019–FY2024

Estimated people who crossed the Southwest border between ports of entry without being apprehended. 2022–23 are extrapolations using the 2021 DHS apprehension rate; 2024 uses a CBO-derived estimate.

But I would not regard that chart as six equally reliable measurements. The first three are substantially better grounded in DHS’s own statistical work; the latter three are estimates constructed from different sources/methodologies.

One particularly important conclusion

The data do not support either of two simplistic claims:

“There were 10+ million people who illegally entered the country during 2019–24.”

That’s essentially treating every encounter as a successful entry, which is incorrect.

Nor does the data support:

“There were only the ~135,000–660,000 successful entries shown by the DHS model.”

because DHS stopped publishing a directly comparable model-based series after 2021, and the later years clearly involved very different migration patterns.

A defensible broad conclusion is that successful unlawful entries were probably on the order of hundreds of thousands per year during the 2021–23 surge, rather than millions of unique people per year. The number of attempts/encounters was much larger because apprehensions and repeat encounters were counted.

And there’s another question that I think is actually more useful for your original interest in the 2019–24 immigration debate:

How many of those people actually remained in the United States?

That’s a different number again. We can get considerably closer to that by taking the border-crossing estimates and then accounting for Title 42 expulsions, Title 8 removals/returns, releases into the U.S., asylum claims, subsequent deportations, and repeat encounters. That would let us estimate the net inflow of unauthorized migrants, rather than merely the number who successfully crossed the border.

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Each time I start to write one of these posts I fall into the trap of assuming that you know what I am talking about, that you have been with me previously on my excursions into the forest of numbers. I cannot know this for certain. Therefore it is probably a good idea to periodically say what this endeavor is about.

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Why I am self-inflicting the tedious work of poring over pension reports and insurance filings is to document the health harms that may be contained in those. The hurt I am chronicling is in the period of the “covid” pandemic. We were promised certain things if we all agreed to do as we were told … let the needle under our skin … we were going to get back to “normal.”

Do you remember that?

Well here we are five to six years on - have we gotten back to anywhere close to what we had before the contagion? All I have to go on are the official numbers contained in the documents that I have found. The evidence is consistently concerning to me. But I have no hope that even these clues will change anyone’s mind.

I am making an archive.

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Hopefully, someday clearer minds will find this and see it for what it is.

Many of my recent posts have been looking at insurance companies and how the subcategory of disability has been evolving during the pandemic. In one of those posts some very concerning disability information was found for one of the major players, Prudential. Within the broad topic of disability there is another subheading: long-term care (LTC). In one of my several posts about Unum, I found some odd statistics for this category.

One thing leads to another, and I have ended up digging deeper into this topic. Where I have landed is at the doorstep of a company I was unaware of … Genworth. Turns out it is the largest provider of long-term care in the United States, more than MetLife or Prudential.

(link)

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A very interesting, and perhaps useful, fact about Genworth is that it stopped writing new long-term care insurance in 2019.

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(link)

“Editor’s note (May 2026)

Genworth Life Insurance Company suspended new individual long-term care insurance applications through the brokerage channel on March 11, 2019. In October 2025, Genworth Financial re-entered new individual LTC sales through its CareScout Insurance subsidiary with CareScout Care Assurance. Privileged Choice Flex and its successors remain legacy Genworth Life products; existing Genworth Life policyholders continue to be serviced under their contracts.”

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(link)

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So in effect, its legacy block of long-term care is a closed set of data that spans the pandemic era. And as such, maybe we can see something more clearly in these unmuddied waters.

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Before we dive in, I have to let you know that we are going to be at a serious disadvantage with this one. Try as I might, I simply have not been able to track down the NAIC statutory filings for Genworth before 2021. They (Genworth) do provide several years on their website 2021 through 2025, but that is it. Believe me, I have really been at it with my research assistant to try and get my hands on those earlier documents - but short of paying a user fee at the NAIC headquarters, I am getting nothing.

Nevertheless, I think we will still be able to see something here.

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When we go to the page with all the statements it will be arranged by quarters. The annual statement for the year is always quarter four, or Q4. When you click on Q4 you will get a drop down with three or four choices of company. We are interested today in the top on the list, Genworth Life Insurance Company.

*I have been opening the PDFs.

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What I am going to focus on this time for Genworth is obviously the long-term care. I will be looking at primarily one page in the various yearly reports - the “ANALYSIS OF OPERATIONS BY LINES OF BUSINESS - ACCIDENT AND HEALTH” - which is page 6.5

On that page are two things of interest:

• Line 13 - Disability benefits and benefits under accident and health contracts

  

• Line 34 - Policies/certificates in force end of year

  

The column that deals with Long-Term Care is number 12.

*I know that is small. Maybe you can enlarge it somehow if needed, but I will now go through the available years and give you the long-term care numbers for line 13 and line 34.

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Genworth Statutory Statements

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2021

*(see first screenshot example)

Line 13 … $2,136,366,206

Line 34 … 970,158

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2022

Line 13 … $2,325,710,072

Line 34 … 941,732

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2023

Line 13 … $2,569,252,329

Line 34 … 914,501

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2024

Line 13 … $2,696,138,676

Line 34 … 888,110

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2025

Line 13 … $2,871,447,119

Line 34 … 860,976

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Now let’s have all that in a couple of easy to look at lists.

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Disability benefits for long-term care (Line 13, Column 12)

2021 … $2,136,366,206

2022 … $2,325,710,072

2023 … $2,569,252,329

2024 … $2,696,138,676

2025 … $2,871,447,119

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Policies/certificates in force for long-term care (Line 34, Column 12)

2021 … 970,158

2022 … 941,732

2023 … 914,501

2024 … 888,110

2025 … 860,976

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Notice anything?

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Yes, one is going up while the other is going down. And here is where the fact that this is a closed pool of insurance makes it all the more interesting. Genworth is not adding any new policies to this group, that was ceased in 2019. So the dwindling policy numbers are to be expected. One would assume that the main driver for this is mortality, though there can be other reasons. But why would that policy shrinkage not have a coinciding reduction in benefits?

Between 2021 and 2025 over 735 million dollars in long-term care disability benefits were added despite a collapsing policy pool.

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That means for every policy in force:

2021: approximately $2,202 of claims paid

2025: approximately $3,334 of claims paid

Increase: approximately $1,132 per policy

Increase: 51.4%

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In other words:

Genworth’s LTC block was 11.3% smaller in 2025, but it generated 51.4% more claims paid per policy than in 2021.

.

???????????????????????????????????????????????????????

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This was the first thing out of my research assistant’s mouth when we came across that nugget:

“The story you’re uncovering is potentially:

Genworth’s LTC block is shrinking, but the economic burden of each remaining policy is rising rapidly.

That is exactly what I’d expect to see in a mature, aging LTC block if the healthier lives are exiting while the higher-risk lives remain and/or claims are lasting longer.”

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Now, that phrase … “healthier lives are exiting” - really caught my attention. When pressed, the assistant started to backpedal a bit, claiming it may have overstated the situation.

Could be, but it was the one that brought it up … unsolicited.

No matter how you slice it, this is not what one would have expected.

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What are we to make of this? The only thing that I can say with any certainty is that long-term care is starting to be way more expensive than it was just a few years ago. A reasonable person would question whether or not the timing of this phenomenon might be related to the effects of the pandemic. Long-term care as it manifests from “covid” the illness may have taken a bit of time to show up in these financials. But certainly that effect should have been mitigated by the vaccines by 2025 … if all was as advertised.

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Why then is this situation looking worse over time?

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What is driving drastically more expensive long-term care?

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Could this just be some kind of anomaly?

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A one off?

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Hmmm … the exact same thing is happening at Genworth for Group Life ~ Death Benefits.

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Take a look.

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*** for this one we will be looking at page 6 … “ANALYSIS OF OPERATIONS BY LINES OF BUSINESS - SUMMARY.”

On that page are two things of interest:

• Line 10 - Death benefits

  

• Line 34 - Policies/certificates in force end of year

The column that deals with Group Life is number 3.

.

2021

Line 10 … $61,169,489

Line 34 … 2,642

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2022

Line 10 … $52,043,087

Line 34 … 2,431

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2023

Line 10 … $76,508,652

Line 34 … 2,268

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2024

Line 10 … $83,661,337

Line 34 … 2,105

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2025

Line 10 … $117,256,174

Line 34 … 1,960

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Now let’s have all that in a couple of easy to look at lists.

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Death benefits for Group Life (Line 10, Column 3)

2021 … $61,169,489

2022 … $52,043,087

2023 … $76,508,652

2024 … $83,661,337

2025 … $117,256,174

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Policies/certificates in force for Group Life (Line 34, Column 3)

2021 … 2,642

2022 … 2,431

2023 …2,268

2024 … 2,105

2025 … 1,960

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Again, as the number of policies shrink, the dollars for death benefits go up.

That can’t be a good sign.

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***Addendum ~ 8/26/2026***

Whilst looking over this post and the supporting documents herein, I have noticed some additional numbers that may be of interest. Particularly so in light of the fact that we have no statements to look at for the years prior to 2021. I am now going to reproduce some of the “Five-Year Historical Data” tables contained in the statements. We have examined this dataset for other insurers in the past for gains and losses from operations. Hopefully here this can give us a different vantage point and a longer view on what we just discussed in the original post.

.

You may recall from some of my older posts that these NAIC statutory statements underwent format changes at various points. As a result, certain lines on tables may or may not be consistent year to year. This is the case for what we are interested in right now. We do not get a clean 5 year range for A&H long-term care until the 2023 statement. 2022 and before all have this data lumped into a catch all number. Even with this disadvantage … looking at the 2023 table will get us back to 2019.

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On the second page of the Five-Year Historical Data starting at Line 72 is the area that spells out the gains and losses:

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A&H long-term care is Line 113 and the total gain/loss is Line 117.

As you can see, the long-term care was giving Genworth consistent gains up until 2023 … then those evaporated and a substantial loss occurred.

Long-term care gain/loss:

2019 … +$68,017,762

2020 … +$444,728,138

2021 … +$753,646,934

2022 … +$269,136,709

2023 … -$91,216,138

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But let’s round this out and get the same data up through 2025.

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Here the A&H long-term care is Line 112 and the total gain/loss is Line 116.

As you can see, long-term care rebounded in 2024 and gave Genworth another good gain, but nowhere near the windfalls of 2020 and 2021. Then we see another substantial loss in 2025, almost identical to the 2023 number.

Let’s update our list.

Long-term care gain/loss:

2019 … +$68,017,762

2020 … +$444,728,138

2021 … +$753,646,934

2022 … +$269,136,709

2023 … -$91,216,138

2024 … +$120,969,731

2025 … -$94,874,562

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So two of the last three years are not looking good at Genworth for long-term care according to this table, which seems to align with the data we have already looked at in the original post. If you recall, 2025 had the largest figure for claims paid for long-term care in the last five years.

But there is one more thing we should consider before we are done with this update. I have red-boxed the “total” number of gains/losses in those screenshots for a reason.

Every single year shown 2019 to 2025 is a gain … except for 2025.

Here is that list …

Total Genworth gain/loss:

2019 … +$134,147,665

2020 … +$440,021,707

2021 … +$810,031,618

2022 … +$357,161,302

2023 … +$144,034,117

2024 … +$151,287,687

2025 … -$45,094,159

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In 2019 the long-term care portion of the total gain was approximately 50%.

But as we go from year to year after that, it (LTC) often represents the lion’s share of whatever gain there is … (In 2020 long-term care was over 100% of the total company gain!).

So, even in the heart of the pandemic, 2020 and 2021, this company was realizing enormous profits from its long-term care operations.

Here is that 2021 dynamic:

.

The loss in long-term care that occurred in 2023 still did not cause an overall loss for that year:

.

That unfortunate situation did not happen until 2025:

.

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The first thing I want to say is that I apologize for my recent Substack Notes I have been writing - pretty much complaining about how my reader view statistics appear to have been targeted for manipulation. I documented this with some compelling screenshots for each of my last three “A Devil At The Crossroads” posts. One reader let me know that this sort of thing has been going on for some time on Substack with other people too. I do appreciate that information. Misery likes company, I guess … so I am ready to stop whining about it. At the end of the day, I still believe Substack is messing with my stats and potentially even filtering or preventing people from seeing my work. I would humbly say that this is because of the content of my posts. They do not like what I am writing about. The ultimate paymasters here would not welcome a great deal of attention accumulating on certain ideas or evidence. The cold hard fact is that Substack can display any number they want in your dashboard. You are powerless to do anything about it … except complain. Maybe that is what they are driving you to do, so that you appear like a paranoid crying baby. And then they can say, “See. Look how they behave. What a shame. They seemed to have some talent.” The reader that clued me in to the fact this has been happening to others, made the astute point that this phenomenon would fly under the radar of the bigger authors on Substack - since their stats are way bigger than mine. Would they even notice if 80 views disappeared?

I doubt it. But for someone like me, that is a large chunk ~ I am averaging about 400 views these days. And frankly, looking at my view number is the main way I know if I am reaching anybody. I do not normally get a robust comment section like some other writers. Again, not complaining. Just saying it like it is.

If I am correct about some interference on Substack’s part in this, then I believe it is all meant to demoralize writers of certain topics in order to, over time, make them want to quit.

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Dear Substack Handler,

I will not quit.

Go love yourself.

sincerely,

csofand

I am going back to the Texas Employees Retirement System (ERS) to give you a look at their Gain / Loss tables for financial experience. This, if you recall, is basically the actuaries placing a bet on what they think is going to happen … and then they report back on how they did. Were they off up, or were they off down.

Got it?

These folks at the ERS did not make it easy to decipher. They played a little fast and loose with the parentheses on the numbers. Suffice it to say, that they are using the parentheses in an atypical fashion here. They are putting gains inside the parentheses and losses do not have them.

AND do not get confused by a seeming contradiction to that dynamic from the header of the table …

… that is a sneaky way to make things more complicated than they have to be.

Trust me.

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I am going to cut to the chase and give you the graphs of all the gain/loss numbers first. Then if you want the details, you can scroll further down and see all the tables reproduced from the ERS annual reports.

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We will look at the retirees to begin, since it is a little more straightforward to understand. The description from the table is clear.

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As you look at the next graph for the retirees, anything ABOVE the zero line is showing retirees living “not as long” as the actuaries (bookies) thought.

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As you can see, the retirees of the ERS were hit very hard in 2021 and 2022. After a reprieve in 2023, the gains surge back again in 2024. And if we are being honest, 2025 is still troubling, since it is equal to the “no vaccine” year of 2020.

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What about the active workers of the ERS?

The line on the tables that addresses this group is a little more complicated. It covers several situations and is a catch-all statistic. But two of the sub-categories are very important to our investigation here: Disability and Death-In-Service.

Now here we have to pause and remember that for this stat it is actually the opposite effect we are looking for … in that a loss shows some increased disability and mortality. I say “some” because we simply have no way to determine the actual percentage of the numbers that we can allocate to those two parts of this catch-all line. I would argue that they represent a very significant portion.

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The graph is clear. Starting in 2024, the active workers were massively affected by “something” that threw the actuaries (bookies) predictions out the window. AND it did not stop … it kept going out the window faster into 2025.

Not good.

Link to reports 2021 to 2025

Link to older reports (2020 not available)

“Analysis of Financial Experience

Actual financial experience will not coincide exactly with assumed financial experience because the future cannot be predicted with 100 percent precision. The assumed experience should be changed to reflect observed reality when an actuarial investigation reveals that the difference between actual and assumed experience in the various risk areas to be material and persistent.

If the differences between actual and assumed experience is financially favorable or unfavorable, such differences are called actuarial gains or losses. In the actuarial valuation of the System, actuarial gains and losses are recognized immediately, with actuarial gains decreasing the unfunded actuarial accrued liability and actuarial losses increasing the unfunded actuarial accrued liability. A general description of actuarial gains and losses for age and service retirements, disability retirements, death-in-service benefits, and withdrawal from employment is summarized as follows:

Age and Service Retirement:

If members retire at younger (older) ages or with final average pay that is higher (lower) than assumed, there is a loss (gain).

Disability Retirement:

If disability claims are more (less) than assumed, there is a loss (gain).

Death-in-Service Benefit:

If survivor claims are more (less) more than assumed, there is a loss (gain).

Withdrawal from Employment:

If withdrawals are less (more) than assumed, there is a loss (gain).

The gains and losses in actuarial accrued liabilities resulting from differences between assumed experience and actual experience … “

2025

Page 151

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2024

Page 146

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2023

Page 132

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2022

Page 131

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2021

Page 127

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2020

???

***since each report displays two years of data, we can rely on the 2021 table to give us the 2020 numbers.***

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2019

Page 128

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2018

Page 124

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2017

Page 127

.

2016

Page 120

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Maybe I was clairvoyant in some way when I did this old post. I have this guy standing by a road, and for some reason I decided to put an aggressive red tint over the whole scene. Did I know somehow that almost exactly one year later I would be talking about devils at crossroads in Texas?

Kinda weird.

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Believe it or not, I completely forgot that I had done that one and I was getting ready to dig into the current annual report from this system. But since I have now done so many posts about pension systems, I thought I should take a look at my archive. And there it was. So a good deal of the heavy lifting is already done for this one. The only downside to that is the older post ends at 2024, so we will have to bring in the fresh data for 2025 before we are done.

Not so bad.

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Texas Municipal Retirement System (TMRS)

Annual Comprehensive Financial Report

for the year ended December 31, 2024.

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Texas Municipal Retirement System (TMRS)

Annual Comprehensive Financial Report

for the year ended December 31, 2025.

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The first thing we have to understand is just what is the life insurance statistic in this annual report. The terminology used is not that clear. They have something called a “Supplemental death benefit.”

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Page 21 {of the 2025 report}

“The Supplemental Death Benefits Fund (SDBF), which provides a lump-sum death benefit to the beneficiaries of active members and retirees of participating cities that provide supplemental death benefits.”

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“In the Texas TMRS, are “Supplemental death benefits” similar to group life insurance at all?”

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Yes, they are not just similar—the Texas Municipal Retirement System (TMRS) Supplemental Death Benefits Fund (SDBF) explicitly operates like a group-term life insurance plan. In fact, the IRS and TMRS treat the payouts structurally and functionally just like group life insurance. [1, 2, 3]

Key Similarities

• Purpose: They provide a lump-sum cash payment to a designated beneficiary if the employee passes away. [1]

• Active Employee Payout: If an active worker dies while employed by a participating city that offers the coverage, the payout is roughly equal to the employee’s current annual salary (matching typical group life coverage formulas). [, 2]

• Retiree Payout: If a retiree passes away from a city providing this option, it pays a flat one-time lump sum (typically $7,500).

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Page 24 {of the 2025 report}

(Net Position – Supplemental Death Benefits Fund)

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Right off the bat in this report they are telling us that the equivalent of group life insurance payouts have increased a whopping 41% from 2024 to 2025.

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That does not look good.

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Now straight from the horse’s mouth on what the nitty gritty is here …

Page 33 {of the 2025 report}

(Notes to Financial Statements)

“TMRS administers the Supplemental Death Benefits Fund (SDBF), which is an optional death benefit plan that operates like a group-term life insurance plan. The SDBF allows participating cities to provide supplemental death benefits for their active members, with optional coverage for their retirees. The SDBF had 828 participating cities as of December 31, 2025.”

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So here they are confirming it is basically the same as life insurance. I put in the red arrow in the screenshot to call your attention to the fact that this is predominantly an active member statistic … they are roughly double the number of the retirees.

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Okay, so now that we have a better picture of just what this is and its makeup, let’s look at the ten year tables in the Statistical section.

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In my older post about this system I covered my normal categories of statistics, and maybe we will take a look at those before we are done. But right now let’s just focus on these Supplemental death benefits.

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Pages 84 & 85 {of the 2025 report}

(Changes in Fiduciary Net Position — Last 10 Years (Supplemental Death Benefits Fund) ~ For the Year Ended December 31)

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So now I will pull in a graph I made in that older post which shows the active Supplemental death benefits:

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*I am getting tired, so I won’t make a new graph updating the 2025 figure for this category. If you go back to the table and look at the numbers, you will see that the 2025 stat is now the second largest in the 10 year range … only that devastating 2021 number tops it.

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Not good.

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Those numbers for the active members are hard to take. I am sorry to always bring you such bad news.

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I truly wish I did not have to.

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It isn’t really that much better for the retired folks here either. If you will notice, there was a gradual increase in these payments year over year between 2016 to 2019 for the retired members. The average amount in that range was $5,088,561 annually. When we get to 2020 for the retirees we do not really see a dramatic increase in comparison to 2019. The big jump starts to happen in 2021 … and really gets underway in 2022. It has since started to taper back down, but all the numbers 2021 and after are well into the 6 million dollar plateau.

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Supplemental death benefits - Retired

2016 … $4,726,250

2017 … $4,771,250

2018 … $5,355,144

2019 … $5,501,603

2020 … $5,738,125

2021 … $6,240,625

2022 … $6,967,512

2023 … $6,874,166

2024 … $6,453,411

2025 … $6,572,833

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***My older post, as I say, has a bunch more stuff to look at if you are interested. There are members removed from rolls and death refunds, but I will leave this one here for now since we are really on the topic of group life insurance.***

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Part One

Part Two

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We are continuing our examination of a trio of Texas pension systems that provide group life insurance statistics.

This second installment will be looking at the Texas County and District Retirement System (TCDRS).

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Annual Comprehensive Financial Report

of the

Texas County & District Retirement System (TCDRS)

for the year ending Dec. 31, 2025

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Page 7

“Since 1967, TCDRS has grown into a $56.5 billion

trust, partnering with more than 900 counties and

governmental districts to provide reliable retirement,

disability and survivor benefits.”

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Page 22

“TCDRS operates two trusts, both of which are

accounted for as fiduciary funds. The Pension

Trust Fund accounts for and provides retirement,

disability and survivor benefits to the employees of

participating employers. The Group Term Life Fund

(GTLF or Group Term Life) provides a program of

group term life insurance for the employees and, if

covered, retirees of electing employers. No assets

of the Pension Trust Fund may be used to pay any

insurance benefit due from the GTLF, nor may assets

of the GTLF be used to pay any benefit due from

the Pension Trust Fund. Discussion and analysis is

provided separately for each of the two trusts.

The Statements of Fiduciary Net Position and

Statements of Changes in Fiduciary Net Position

show financial information for both the Pension Trust

Fund and the GTLF.”

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Page 25

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A little closer on the total liabilities boxed in red:

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Now as you can see, the actuaries here are saying that the total liabilities for group term life are increasing substantially over the two years following 2023 … I say increasing as compared to 2023. This table does spell out just how large that increase is from 2023 to 2024.

It is a whopping 62.7% increase in total group life liabilities!

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The table does also give you the % change from 2024 to 2025, which is a negative number (20.7%) ~ since 2025 is the smaller of the two. But if we are comparing 2025 to 2023, then we still do have an actual increase in liabilities to the tune of 28.9%.

Just what could be the cause of these significant increases in total group life liabilities in these recent years?

In a pension report, what does an increase in "total liabilities" mean for group term life?

“An increase in "total liabilities" for a group term life insurance plan in a pension report means the estimated future cost of paying out death benefits has gone up. It represents a larger financial obligation that the plan sponsor must eventually pay. [1, 2]

Primary Drivers of the Increase

• Changes in Actuarial Assumptions:

  • Lowering the discount rate increases the present value of future liabilities.

  • Updating mortality tables to show longer life expectancies or higher near-term mortality risks. [1, 2]”

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Higher near-term mortality risks?

“An increase in near-term mortality risk means the actuary expects more deaths to occur sooner rather than later. For a group term life insurance plan, this has a immediate, direct impact on financial calculations.

Why It Raises Liabilities

• Accelerated Payouts: Life insurance pays out a lump sum immediately upon death. If more participants are expected to die in the near future, the plan must prepare to pay out those cash benefits much sooner than previously planned.

• Loss of Time Value: Money loses value over time, so future liabilities are "discounted" (reduced) based on how far in the future they will occur. When a payout moves from 20 years away to 2 years away, it loses that discount, making the liability today much larger.

• Lost Premium Income: If the plan relies on ongoing contributions or premiums from active employees, early deaths mean fewer years of collecting those inflows.”

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This is an ominous sign right in the opening sections of the report.

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But can we look a little farther back in time for this same statistic?

Sure.

Here is an archive of the older reports. Now let’s grab the same table from the 2022 and the 2019 annual reports:

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Here is the progression for total liabilities in group life:

2017 … $593,065

2018 … $682,681

2019 … $922,073

2020 … $1,191,274

2021 … $1,033,943

2022 … $983,716

2023 … $1,173,726

2024 … $1,909,094

2025 … $1,513,256

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I think that pretty much everyone would agree, that when it comes to looking for the benchmarks for pandemic stats, you have to measure all things against either 2020 or 2021. Personally, I think it only fair to measure against 2020, the “no vaccine” year. Well, either way you do it here, 2020 or 2021 as the litmus … the last two years, 2024 and 2025 look much worse for this life insurance trend, especially 2024.

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Now on that same page as we are finding these total liabilities, there is another table that will show you a similar three year range for Insurance Benefits. I am not going to show you that here because there are tables later on that have these same numbers, but in a ten year range.

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So let’s go further in .. boy this is chock full of stuff for a short report!

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***Guess what? I was actually working on a post for this pension system many months ago. I got to a certain point with it and became sidetracked … and so I put it on the shelf. I think I will share some of my usual points for other categories like members removed from rolls as we come across them in the report. Okay?***

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page 72 … {of the 2024 report} … (RETIREMENT PLAN: SUMMARY ACTUARIAL DATA)

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And just so you know what happened in 2025:

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That is the largest number in the range. So add a bar on that last graph for 2025 that is a little bigger than 2020.

Not going the right direction there!

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page 84 & 85 … {of the 2024 report} … (FINANCIAL TRENDS DATA)

*the following image is a composite from the two pages ~ I know it is tiny, I will make some graphs to give you a better view. Hold on.

*red boxes in the highlighted yellow lines above are on the largest in the range for the 2024 report.

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And just so you know what happened in 2025 (the first boxed stat number is “Withdrawals ~ Death” and the second boxed stat number is “Insurance Benefits”):

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2025 Report

Page 85

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So the fresh stats are showing us that the new 2025 “Withdrawals ~ Death” number is now the largest of all in the 10 year range.

And when it comes to the new “Insurance Benefits” number for 2025, it is not the new biggest figure … just the second largest.

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The graphs:

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Believe me, I can keep piling on the stats from this little report … but I am starting to glaze over.

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Maybe I will come back again sometime, but let’s give it a break.

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My takeaway:

• In many places, the numbers for 2021 clearly outstrip 2020 for mortality indicators.

• Sadly, that was not the end of it … the last couple of years have even left 2021 behind for those same numbers.

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Okay, so it is time to get back to work on the important task of archiving the fallout caused by the response to the “covid” pandemic. You may recall that I was off on a new tangent delving into the arcane realm of life insurance companies. That all got kicked off as a result of finding an anomaly in that other land, the world of pension reports. I was scratching my head as to why I was only finding life insurance numbers in just one retirement system report, the one from Wisconsin. It turns out that it is extremely rare.

But just by chance, I have come across a cluster of new examples, in of all places … Texas.

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We are going to look at three pension groups now from Texas. Each includes some sort of life insurance data along with all the normal retirement statistics we are familiar with.

I am going to lead off with one I actually did a report on once before, but at that time I only briefly provided a small snapshot of the life insurance angle.

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2024 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report

Employees Retirement System of Texas (ERS)

for the fiscal year ended August 31, 2024

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If you do go and look at my previous post about this system, you will find that it is one of the most densely packed documents for tables and statistics I have ever seen. This is probably why the whole life insurance detail mostly slipped past my radar. Also, that was a very disturbing one for me to do. The mortality indicators were everywhere, and not good.

I did manage, however, to provide a highlighted table that did note some provocative insurance numbers at the very end of the post. Scan to the bottom of the next table for the line I have in yellow for “Life Claims.”

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A little closer:

My red box in that Life Claims line is around the years 2021 through 2024. As you can plainly see, the big jump up into the 70 million dollar plateau did not happen in 2020. In fact, the jump from 2019 to 2020 is only about 2 million dollar increase year over year. The increased difference from 2020 to 2021 is a staggering 16 million dollars! And as I said, this was a plateau … it did not go back down. Please keep in mind that this Life Claims line is primarily concerned with life insurance payments for working age/active members - retirees can be included in this category, but that is an exception to the rule.

Since my last post about this system, another annual report has been released. Shall we take a look and see what this Life Claims category shows for 2025?

2025 Report

page 172 {(Benefit and Refund Payments - Defined Benefit Plans (Concluded) - Last Ten Years (in 000’s)}

A little closer:

So there you have it. We are still in the 70 million dollar life insurance plateau through the end of fiscal year 2025.

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Not good.

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I will be bringing you {#2} shortly.

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Some of you probably are wondering why I bothered to write that last post emphatically calling out the promotion of “covid” antibody tests. It might seem to be me nitpicking on a minor detail - and it ran the risk of being somewhat divisive. That is a fair reaction and it may explain why I lost a few subscribers. You can’t please everybody.

Quickly, I would just like to say why I think it is important - with no AI, just me telling you how I feel.

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As you may know, I did some deep dives into the scam of the PCR tests. At the end of that process I came to understand that the criminal pandemic operation, or “covid”, simply could not have been successful without these tests creating a perception … I would suggest, actively cultivating a narrative. Some people in this health freedom arena will say that this perception control was 100% of the operation ~ at least until the vaccines arrived. You may not go all in on that allotment, but I think most people here will agree that the control of the narrative was one of the major factors in making the perpetrators’ plan successful. And as such, what I am going to term “Testing is Reality”, was the essential backbone for the weaving of that narrative. This simple, yet very insidious, concept is what allowed such a nonsensical thing as asymptomatic spread to be accepted by large swaths of this planet. This is also what permitted the total case count numbers screaming from our media screens 24/7 to fan the flames of fear across the globe.

As I have told you a few times now, all of the tests for “covid” could not have been used until the pathogen itself was “defined.” That happened on January 10th, 2020 when the sequence of the viral genome was uploaded to servers on the internet. And by the way, that was purely a data event, they had not isolated the pathogen when that was shared.

That act of defining allowed the “story” to go forward … and backward … in time. This backwards look is what most of the promotion of antibody tests as evidence hinges upon.

But in my opinion that is a devil’s bargain … for you are agreeing to use his currency to buy your version of the story.

And it (your story) is still firmly entrenched in this slippery “Testing is Reality” paradigm.

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So to anyone that was offended by that last post, I offer my sincere apologies. The last thing I want to accomplish with my efforts here is any sort of unnecessary strife.

But I believe this is important.

If we are going to be able to stop this madness from happening again, we have to see clearly what structures enabled it the first time.

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Rosetta

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Haystack of Needles

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Agreed, though I am not 100% convinced that there had to have (necessarily) been purposeful manipulation. The capacity for perverse incentives, fear and prior assumptions to make people see patterns in random data never ceases to amaze me. My own view is that “variant spread” was a function of the recipe for the primers being distributed over the internet. Totally agree with you about the “sequence” being an entirely in silico construct which, once released into global repositories, was bound to be found when suitable primers were released. BTW as I am sure YOU know (but many do not appreciate) …

ALL downstream tests rely on the fidelity of “the sequence”, including “serology”:

Sanity Unleashed

Novelty and immunity: Why were we so blind to the obvious?

In “Why do people still believe in Covid?” Jonathan, Martin Neil , and Norman Fenton pulled together threads about PCR testing to remind readers that claims about a spreading novel virus causative of a unique disease are baseless and the WHO’s pandemic declaration was unwarranted, if not fraudulent…

Read more

a year ago · 106 likes · 70 comments · Jonathan Engler and Jessica Hockett

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… ALL downstream tests rely on the fidelity of “the sequence” …

… including “serology.”

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“Could any of these tests have existed for “covid” before the SARS-CoV-2 virus was sequenced in January of 2020?”

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“ … no, not in the strict COVID-specific sense before the virus was sequenced. PCR tests need primers/probes that match the viral genome, and those SARS-CoV-2-specific targets were developed after the genome sequence became available in January 2020. [pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8929009/)

For **antigen tests**: also not as SARS-CoV-2-specific tests before sequencing, because the test antibodies have to be chosen against a known viral protein target, and that target was identified from the virus’s sequence and protein structure once the virus was characterized. [illumina](https://www.illumina.com/areas-of-interest/microbiology/public-health-surveillance/coronavirus-sequencing.html)

For **antibody tests**: not as SARS-CoV-2-specific tests either, because those tests require the viral antigen to be known so the assay can detect human antibodies against it; that design also depends on having identified the virus first. [pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7184973/)

So the short answer is: the general **platforms** already existed, but **COVID-specific versions** of PCR, antigen, and antibody tests depended on knowing what SARS-CoV-2 was, which meant having its sequence or equivalent target information first. [asm](https://asm.org/articles/2020/october/sars-cov-2-sequencing-data-the-devil-is-in-the-gen?fbclid=IwAR14wdJ2n02Nq5mLNxw3zWbRfc4BTj8_HFP0wc27Bkzp5s3LibgFLWhCG4s)

Perplexity

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Lies are Unbekoming

The Antibody Deception: Invisible Enemies, Visible Lies

In the late 19th century, Paul Ehrlich’s vivid drawings of Y-shaped “antibodies”—hypothetical warriors in the blood defending against unseen invaders—captured the scientific imagination, laying the foundation for a medical paradigm that persists today. These artistic renderings, born from observed laboratory reactions like agglutination, were not ground…

Read more

a year ago · 76 likes · 15 comments · Unbekoming

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I am the last one living of my immediate family. As such, I travel at least once a week to the ancestral home of my grandparents to further the cleaning out.

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Today, while putting more free items to the curb, I came across the home of the curtain wasps.

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It exists like a miniature mud pan flute, and one can only wonder what music the wasps blew in its making.

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To them I give thanks.

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It was a

needed

gift today.

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The other day I watched a video of I guess the most popular commentator on ESPN apologize to Kyrie Irving. That was nice to witness. I do not think the rest of us will ever get our apologies from the ones that owe them to us.

Many posts ago I told you about my experience at the county library job I worked for 26 years ~ how I was mandated the jab or lose my job, how I barely got a religious exemption, and how I ultimately had to leave 4 years shy of my full retirement benefits … because it was unbearable. I told you about the library director that I had to beg at the last moment for a Hail Mary, to ask that they encourage the HR department to take my exemption request seriously, since all signs at the end of that process looked like I was going to lose my job. I told the director that I felt like a piece of garbage they wanted to throw away. I do not know if it was only the director’s intervention that saved my job (albeit temporarily) or if it was just a game of sadistic “chicken” the HR staff was playing to see if I would blink.

Those are some of the people that should do like the ESPN talking head, and send me (along with the rest of the unvaccinated library staff) an apology.

But it will never happen.

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The winners always get to tell the stories about what happened. I doubt if the ESPN person would have made that apology now if it weren’t for the recent Fauci testimony in Congress. There are many people that I respect here in the “health freedom” arena that have warned us to not place too much weight on those proceedings. And I largely agree with that. But in this case, the ESPN guy mentioned the Fauci testimony several times throughout his lengthy apology to Kyrie. I think in this sport man’s mind Fauci had become a loser, and so it was now OK to change his story about the basketball star he had vilified during the pandemic. But you see, as long as Fauci was a winner, he (ESPN man) was going to stick with his harsh assessment of Kyrie.

This guy lives and breathes sports.

It’s all about being on the winning team.

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I am not celebrating.

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I like Kyrie and will always admire what he did. He deserved that apology.

But the people that did this to us during “covid” are now in almost complete control of the creation of our stories - the ones the masses … the “normies” consume.

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Case in point, and speaking of Hail Marys …

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A few days before I witnessed that apology to Kyrie, I was innocently looking for a cheesy movie to watch with my spouse. Something mindless and entertaining. Knowing nothing at all about it, other than it had an actor that I kind of liked, we decided to take advantage of our current privileges at Amazon Prime and cue up something called Project Hail Mary.

I thought we were in for a kid oriented sci-fi fluff piece. And on the surface it could be seen as such. Our main character is a school teacher. The film is chock full of special effects. And there is a cute alien sidekick that looks like a spider-crab and a brick had a baby.

But as the story of this film unfolded, something started to unsettle me about it. I began feeling an itching dread that this was not the mindless fluff I wanted after all. I should have known there was a dark dimension lurking beneath from the opening scene.

Our protagonist wakes up on a spaceship, confused and not knowing where he is. He crawls away from his sleep pod like a worm in an orange prison jumper, only to be dragged back by a robotic arm.

You see, he just forgot he was on a mission to save humanity.

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Fortunately for us, they then take us on a flashback to his classroom on Earth where he is explaining to a bunch of adorable children that the sun is sick ~ there are these little space bugs attacking it. And the adults of Earth only have a small window of time to find a way to fix it. Hmmm, that kind of sounds familiar. Our guy is a super smart scientist, by the way. He is soon visited by a white lady that wears a lot of fabric around her head and talks like she could be the granddaughter of Mengele - German accent and all - maybe could also a relative of someone named Schwab?

This weird woman then convinces our guy to work on the project to save us all and the planet. He lives up to his reputation as a smarty, and comes up with really helpful stuff for them to get ready to send off the big spaceship out into space. One day a bad thing happens and somebody on the spaceship team dies.

The lady asks our guy to volunteer to go on the mission.

(she reminds me of another lady that likes scarves … but I digress)

Did I say it is a suicide mission yet?

He does not want to do it.

Flash forward.

After he wakes up on the spaceship and figures out that he is the last hope for humanity because the other people on the ship died in their prison … I mean sleep pods … he teams up with the “brick crab” to stop the space bugs. They send out a probe to collect samples.

Now that probe also reminds me of something, but I can’t place it.

Oh well, maybe it will come to me.

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Well, the dynamic duo figured it out and stopped the sun-killing bugs.

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The end.

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Oh, but I forgot to finish telling you about how our guy got on the spaceship.

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Remember, he did not want to do it. It was a sacrifice he was not willing to make.

The lady did not take “No” for an answer.

He was being selfish ~ and the schoolchildren, their grandparents and the planet needed saving.

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So …

… she called in some guys to help him make the required concessions.

He fought them really hard.

He ran.

They chased him to the edge of the science camp where the barbed wire fence waited.

They threw him to the ground.

And against his will, they plunged a needle into his body.

That’s why he didn’t remember how he got on the spaceship.

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But it’s okay, because he got to be a hero.

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(All the preceding images from the film are reproduced under fair use).

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Citation: Project Hail Mary. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Amazon MGM Studios, 2026.

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Geez, csofand that is nice. All these years after covid, who can blame some screenwriters for maybe even subconsciously weaving in a few plot lines from the big event. Why don’t you just take it easy and enjoy the film?

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Uh …

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You should look at this:

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“No, the novel Project Hail Mary was officially published on May 4, 2021.

The confusion comes from the film’s early development history: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer acquired the adaptation rights for $3 million in early 2020 while the book was still an unpublished, unreleased manuscript. Ryan Gosling also signed on to star and produce that same year, months before the public could buy the book.”

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“Amazon MGM Studios fully financed and backed the production of Project Hail Mary.

Key details regarding the film’s financing include:

* Total Budget: The studio invested a massive $248 million production budget, which was reduced to a net cost of roughly $200 million after factoring in generous UK film tax credits.

* The Initial Investment: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer originally bought the film rights to Andy Weir’s book for $3 million back in 2020 before its official publication.

* The Amazon Takeover: When Amazon acquired MGM for $8.5 billion in 2022, it inherited the project and chose to fully finance it as its first massive, global theatrical gamble.”

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That’s right.

This thing was conceived in early 2020.

My guy Ryan got on board right at the beginning.

You see, they know you have to get a head start on really important stuff.

Plant the seeds.

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Tell the kids a story.

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If only Kyrie could have watched this inspiring film before the pandemic, then he might have had a chance to understand what it means to be a real hero … even if you don’t want to.

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Sorry for the rant in my title sequence there. I am fed up with these jokers and the games they brazenly played right in front of our faces during the pandemic.

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You will see what I am talking about a little later.

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Holy cow! This company is making my head hurt. I just keep finding new layers … or should I say mostly the same layers, but tucked away in different darkly-lit alcoves of the maze.

Last time I was attempting to get closer to the meat of the statistics for disability at Unum. To try and get that better view, we were consulting the ANALYSIS OF OPERATIONS BY LINES OF BUSINESS table. That was okay, but I think we can do better.

Well if you recall, a few posts back, I was looking at the disability numbers at Prudential and I was consulting something called Schedule H, Part 5 - Health Claims … we are going to try that same trick here today for Unum.

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But first, we have to figure out how in the heck to find it!

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You see, Unum is pretty tricky with how it displays its annual reports.

Everything I have shown you about this company (so far) has been from clicking the obvious yearly file links where the red arrow is:

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But would you have known that this is only a fraction of what is available?

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I knew I was missing a lot when the document I opened was only 82 pages long. Usually the entire thing is several hundred … even approaching a thousand in some cases!

So where the hell is the rest?

If you click on the name of the company, Unum Life Insurance Company of America, you will get a hidden drop down menu:

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Through some trial and error, I figured out that Schedule H was in the “State Pages …”

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Okay. Let’s go get all the “Direct-Claims Paid” numbers like we did for Prudential now.

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2025

A little closer on the important bits:

*Now that you see the structure, we will just go straight to the important bits in the following.

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2024

A little closer:

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2023

A little closer:

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2022

A little closer:

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***Here is where we run into the format change to the tables. Prior to 2022 there simply was not the same level of detail. We do not get separate columns for “Disability Income” and “Long-term Care” ~ everything is just lumped into the “Other” category.

Later we will discuss how to adjust for this and get close to the same categories in these older sets of data.

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2021

A little closer:

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2020

A little closer:

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2019

A little closer:

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2018

A little closer:

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2017

A little closer:

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2016

A little closer:

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2015

A little closer:

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Okay so that is the hard part.

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Now let’s put all that together … hopefully in a linear progression.

As I said, there is a reasonable way to adjust the older numbers to align with the detailed categories of “Disability Income” and “Long-term Care” that we have seen 2022 to 2025.

After some productive back and forth with one of my research assistants, we came to a defensible way to reconstruct the older numbers. Since we do have the detailed statistics for 2022 to 2025, the assistant came up with a mathematical way to reconstruct the “Disability Income” and “Long-term Care” portions of the older “Other” numbers.

The assistant came up with a Four-Year Weighted stratagem based on the trends demonstrated in the 2022 to 2025 data:

“ … I will then calculate:

1. Total “Other-type health” claims paid each year:

   DI(Disability Income) +LTC(Long-term Care)+Other Health

2. Annual allocation percentages

   • Disability Income share

   • Long-Term Care share

   • Other Health share

3. Four-year weighted average allocation

4. Stability analysis

   • Did Unum’s mix stay consistent from 2022–2025?

   • Is it reasonable to use that mix to estimate pre-2022 years? …”

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Long story short, this is how the assistant advised to break down that “Other” number:

So the estimated historical allocation factor would be:

• Disability Income: 68.0%

• Long-Term Care: 25.3%

• Other Health: 6.7%

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I will now apply those percentages to the older “Other” numbers and put everything into an easy to look at list.

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Disability Income ~ Claims Paid

2015 … $1,689,005,848

2016 … $1,709,971,804

2017 … $1,718,454,301

2018 … $1,764,475,754

2019 … $1,826,052,976

2020 … $1,845,694,320

2021 … $1,895,502,470

2022 … $2,021,183,866

2023 … $1,976,657,307

2024 … $1,920,262,470

2025 … $1,907,182,727

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Long-term Care ~ Claims Paid

2015 … $628,409,529

2016 … $636,210,098

2017 … $639,366,086

2018 … $656,488,773

2019 … $679,399,122

2020 … $686,706,857

2021 … $705,238,419

2022 … $609,661,521

2023 … $682,948,167

2024 … $769,163,829

2025 … $849,375,375

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So what does that tell us?

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Here are my observations:

• Perhaps surprisingly, the disability claims paid that peaked in 2022, have begun to taper back down somewhat in the last couple of years. However, they still hover above 2021 levels (which one would have assumed to be the worst of it ~ the pandemic) … especially if certain medical interventions had performed as advertised.

• And since these numbers obviously do go up and down … once again we see the clear outstripping of 2020 by 2021 in these disability claims paid ~ to the tune of $50,000,000. FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS.

• Everybody now … DELTA VARIANT!!!

• ***And “Delta” just kept getting worser and worser into 2022, according to these disability claims paid numbers.***

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Maybe we need a graph?

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Alright … now let’s get to the long-term care monster.

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Maybe you remember the disturbing number we saw for 2025 in the Five-Year Historical Data table?

Let’s look at that again:

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That is a whacko big jump from 2024 to 2025!

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But was it all just a bit of bookkeeping wizardry? … Or did something really happen in this category to “spook” Unum into doing a big move?

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Here is the graph of the actual long-term care claims paid from what we just looked at in this post:

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Hmmm … think this trend of actual “claims paid” might have caused Unum to want to jump ship?

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That’s what it looks like to me.

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Supplemental

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That sounds good. Starting with Unum is a sensible test case because the expected mix should be relatively stable given their concentration in disability income.

Bring in the 2022–2025 Schedule H, Part 5, Section A, Line 4 (Claims Paid) numbers for Unum.

For now, just provide:

YearDisability IncomeLong-Term CareOther Health2022202320242025

I will then calculate:

1. Total “Other-type health” claims paid each year:

   DI+LTC+Other Health

2. Annual allocation percentages

   • Disability Income share

   • Long-Term Care share

   • Other Health share

3. Four-year weighted average allocation

4. Stability analysis

   • Did Unum’s mix stay consistent from 2022–2025?

   • Is it reasonable to use that mix to estimate pre-2022 years?

After that, we can bring in Unum’s 2021 and earlier reported Other column and test the backcast.

I know you only allow minimal image uploads, should I not do screenshots, and manually enter the data?

For this particular task, manual entry is probably better than screenshots.

You are right that image uploads can be limiting, and there are a few advantages to entering the numbers:

• No transcription risk from OCR (statutory statements often have tiny fonts, commas, parentheses, and footnotes).

• I can calculate directly from the values you provide.

• It will make it easier to compare multiple years and eventually multiple companies.

I would suggest you enter just the relevant line items. No need to copy the whole page.

For Unum, something like:

Unum Life Insurance Company of America

2022
Disability Income: $
Long-Term Care: $
Other Health: $

2023
Disability Income: $
Long-Term Care: $
Other Health: $

2024
Disability Income: $
Long-Term Care: $
Other Health: $

2025
Disability Income: $
Long-Term Care: $
Other Health: $

A couple of details:

• Please include the dollar amounts exactly as reported (usually in thousands of dollars in statutory statements).

• If the filing says “000s omitted” or “dollars in thousands,” tell me that once so we keep the scale consistent.

• Please use the same legal entity each year. Unum has several statutory entities, and mixing Unum Life with First Unum Life would distort the allocation.

Once we have those four years, I’ll calculate the mix and tell you whether using it as a backcast allocation for the pre-2022 “Other” column is statistically reasonable.

Ad

Unum Life Insurance Company of America 2022 Disability Income: $2,021,183,866 Long-Term Care: $ 609,661,521 Other Health: $193,843,450 2023 Disability Income: $1,976,657,307 Long-Term Care: $682,948,167 Other Health: $237,887,737 2024 Disability Income: $1,920,262,470 Long-Term Care: $769,163,829 Other Health: $198,683,666 2025 Disability Income: $1,907,182,727 Long-Term Care: $849,375,375 Other Health: $136,676,915

Great. These are exactly the numbers needed. I ran the allocation analysis for Unum Life Insurance Company of America using Schedule H, Part 5, Section A, Line 4 (Claims Paid).

I treated the three post-2022 categories as the old “Other” equivalent:

Old Other Equivalent=Disability Income+Long-Term Care+Other Health

1. Annual mix

YearDisability IncomeLong-Term CareOther HealthTotalDI %LTC %Other Health %2022$2.021B$0.610B$0.194B$2.825B71.5%21.6%6.9%2023$1.977B$0.683B$0.238B$2.897B68.2%23.6%8.2%2024$1.920B$0.769B$0.199B$2.888B66.5%26.6%6.9%2025$1.907B$0.849B$0.137B$2.893B65.9%29.4%4.7%

A few things stand out:

• Disability Income is clearly the largest component.

• Long-Term Care is not trivial—it is actually growing as a share.

• Other Health is consistently small.

2. Four-year weighted average allocation

Rather than averaging the percentages, I weighted by actual dollars:

Total 2022–2025 claims paid:

$11.503 billion

Breakdown:

Category2022–2025 TotalAllocationDisability Income$7.825B68.0%Long-Term Care$2.911B25.3%Other Health$0.767B6.7%

So the estimated historical allocation factor would be:

• Disability Income: 68.0%

• Long-Term Care: 25.3%

• Other Health: 6.7%

3. Stability assessment

I would classify this as moderately strong evidence for backcasting.

Why:

Disability Income

• 71.5% → 65.9%

• Range: 5.6 percentage points

Very stable.

Long-Term Care

• 21.6% → 29.4%

• Range: 7.8 percentage points

Less stable, but the trend is logical: LTC claims are becoming a larger share.

Other Health

• 4.7%–8.2%

Small and volatile, but not material.

4. My recommendation for Unum historical reconstruction

For pre-2022 “Other” claims paid, I would use:

Estimated componentAllocationDisability Income68%Long-Term Care25%Other Health7%

I would consider that a reasonable analytical estimate, with a note that it is derived from 2022–2025 reported mix, not directly reported historical data.

For example, if Unum reported in 2021:

Schedule H Part 5 Section A Line 4 “Other” claims paid = $2.5 billion

Your reconstructed estimate would be:

• Disability Income: ~$1.70B

• Long-Term Care: ~$0.63B

• Other Health: ~$0.18B

One interesting finding: I would not have guessed LTC would be as high as 25% for Unum. It is a good reminder that “largest disability carrier” does not mean the old Other bucket was almost entirely disability. The LTC block is large enough that ignoring it would materially overstate historical disability claims.

The next useful step would be to bring in Unum’s 2021, 2020, etc. “Other” claims paid and see whether the reconstructed disability trend looks reasonable compared with the post-2022 actuals.

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This was actually a fascinating statutory reporting question, and you approached it the right way: rather than assuming the old “Other” bucket was mostly one product line, you used the new reporting detail to test whether a reasonable allocation could be derived.

For Unum, I think your approach is quite defensible. I would document it something like this in your dataset notes:

Estimated pre-2022 Schedule H Part 5 Section A Line 4 claims paid by product line. Prior to 2022, Disability Income, Long-Term Care, and Other Health were combined within the “Other” category. Historical values were allocated using the weighted average product mix reported for Unum Life Insurance Company of America for 2022–2025: Disability Income 68.0%, Long-Term Care 25.3%, Other Health 6.7%.

A couple of suggestions before you apply it broadly:

1. Keep the original statutory number.
   Do not replace the old “Other” value. Keep:

   • Reported_Other_Claims_Paid

   • Estimated_DI_Claims_Paid

   • Estimated_LTC_Claims_Paid

   • Estimated_Other_Health_Claims_Paid

2. Save the allocation assumptions.
   If you later revisit the methodology, you’ll know exactly what was applied.

3. Check the reasonableness after backcasting.
   Once you reconstruct 2018–2021, look at:

   • Does disability claims paid trend smoothly into 2022?

   • Does LTC appear to grow gradually rather than jump artificially?

   • Do the reconstructed totals always tie back exactly to the statutory “Other” number?

One other thing I found interesting from your numbers: the LTC share rising from about 22% to 29% over the period is not just noise. If you eventually analyze a longer Unum history, I would be interested to see whether the LTC share was already increasing before 2022. That could tell you whether the 25.3% backward allocation is conservative or whether earlier years had a different mix.

Whenever you are ready to continue—whether it is Unum’s older years or another carrier—we can use the same framework. Good luck with the dataset; this is exactly the kind of problem where careful documentation of assumptions matters as much as the calculations.

Okay, the last couple of posts about the largest disability insurance carrier in this country ~ Unum ~ have been just scratching the surface. The focus on the Five-Year Historical Data tables and the Net Gains from Operations in those posts are a fine starting point, but those glimpses leave a great deal of room for speculation as to why the numbers are what they are.

This time let us try to get closer to the meat of those numbers.

Today we are only going to look at UNUM LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY OF AMERICA from the list of the various entities under the Unum umbrella.

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*Be sure to filter the “Filing Type” to be “LIFE-AS”.

We will now go to each year’s annual filing for that entity and look at this table:

ANALYSIS OF OPERATIONS BY LINES OF BUSINESS.

In general, it shows up on page 6 .. the pre-2019 tables are slightly different in format. We are looking specifically for the Accident and Health (A & H) numbers that occur on line 13 of the tables. In the pre-2019 tables we will combine columns 9 and 11, post-2019 we only need to look at column 6.

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Unum’s statutory filings on their website.

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2015

A little closer:

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2016

A little closer:

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2017

A little closer:

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2018

A little closer:

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2019

A little closer:

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2020

A little closer:

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2021

A little closer:

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2022

A little closer:

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2023

A little closer:

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2024

A little closer:

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2025

A little closer:

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Okay then, let us put all that into an easy to look at list:

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Disability benefits and benefits under accident and health contracts.

2015 … $1,437,236,646

2016 … $1,407,098,952

2017 … $1,422,554,389

2018 … $1,416,241,238

2019 … $1,407,401,326

2020 … $1,458,104,207

2021 … $1,576,988,938

2022 … $1,515,855,564

2023 … $1,517,524,909

2024 … $1,473,794,820

2025 … $1,618,735,208

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And the graph you know I have to make …

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This is where I am going to say that 2025 should NOT be larger than 2020 or 2021.

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We were promised that if we were all good boys and girls and rolled up our sleeves, then we were building a better world … for grandma.

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But this is the same story here with Unum as what I showed you with Prudential …

2025 was brutal for disability in our working age citizens.

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First off, let me apologize for the confusion in my last post about Unum … and whether or not some of the numbers needed to have three zeroes added.

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You see I have been accustomed to looking at a good deal of pension reports that tell you at the top of tables that dollar amounts are “In Thousands” or “In Millions” ~ and when you see that, everything on the table is treated the same:

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So when that Five-Year Historical Data table in the NAIC statutory filings made the statement at the top that three zeroes were omitted …

… I assumed it was like those pension reports. But I was wrong.

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In my defense, I did consult a research assistant on the matter before putting out that post. And that first assistant (I have a few I rotate jobs with) seemed sure it was the case that we needed to add those zeroes. But then the very large number in the billions of dollars seemed off to me after I published the post. I approached a different research assistant and they walked me through why that particular line did not need to have the three zeroes added after all. I am now convinced that those numbers regarding Unum’s long-term care should remain in the millions, not billions. This just goes to show how unnecessarily complex these documents are to decipher.

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Okay, got that off my chest.

.

So what else do I have to tell you now?

As I hinted at in that last post, the company structure underneath the Unum umbrella is multifaceted.

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Because of that, the sheer number of statements (quarterly and annual) is a bit daunting to sift through. By pure chance, once again, I came across another instance of the long-term care numbers getting disproportionately large in 2025. I found it in the 2025 report for Provident Life and Accident Insurance Company.

Let’s look at the five-year table for those folks:

page 23

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A little closer:

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Losses are in parentheses ( ).

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Here is that list of A & H (Accident and Health) long-term care gain or loss numbers:

2021 … +$76,618,295

2022 … +$21,182,684

2023 … -$33,597,858

2024 … +$10,305,695

2025 … -$247,000,181

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Now if we add that 2025 PROVIDENT LIFE AND ACCIDENT INSURANCE COMPANY big loss to the one we just saw in the last post for UNUM LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY OF AMERICA in 2025 (-$781,315,326), we actually do cross over into the billion dollar range.

Just these two Unum entities combined show a 2025 loss in long-term care of …

-$1,028,315,507

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That seems like big news to me, especially when you see the progression of the last five years.

Something just hit the fan in 2025.

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What exactly that is I am not totally sure yet. My “assistants” have a few explanations they have floated with me. This could be some restructuring of the company ~ perhaps in preparation for ceding the long-term care block of business to some other reinsurer. There could also be some actuarial influence in this … where some definitions were adjusted? Maybe. But the thing nobody wants to talk about much is that it could be significantly due to some very poor health outcomes for the insured members. I mean the largest group disability carrier in the country doesn’t just start tanking a major line of business for no reason. Either this is a signal of major health harms happening now … OR this is Unum intentionally getting ready to offload its long-term care responsibilities.

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And just why would they want to do that?

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Now?

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In an effort to make this one shorter than usual, I am just going to cut to the chase. And if I were you, reading my posts, I would be saying … “oh great here comes another exercise in mind-numbing statistics, yay!”

So here is a try at some brevity

Unum is the largest disability insurance carrier in this country.

“Yes, Unum Group is widely recognized as the largest provider of group and individual disability benefits in the United States and a leading disability income insurer globally. [1, 2]”

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I mentioned this company in my last post about New York Life. That reference was about a statement from Unum itself (in a company publication) that group disability numbers were causing recent financial losses.

I decided to follow this lead a little further, and tracked down Unum’s statutory filings on their website. If New York Life seemed overly byzantine to me, well, these guys take the cake. As with New York Life, Unum has multiple offshoots, each with their own set of documents to sift through.

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I got very lucky with my first stab in the dark.

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That “AS” on the file type I believe stands for Annual Statement ~ and then one assumes that “QS” stands for Quarterly Statement. So moving forward, I can just go straight to those annual documents.

In my last post I introduced you to the Five-Year Historical Data tables. We are going to look at that table again here for Unum. As last time, we are going to focus on the second page of the table where it breaks down Net Gains From Operations. But first I will remind you that these numbers we are going to see are lacking three zeroes:

{***UPDATE 7/24/26 at 5:22 pm … there may be certain lines in the table that do not need three zeroes added. It could be the case that the following numbers I will show you do not get those added after all. Instead of billions, we are talking millions. But the ratio of change amongst the range 2021 to 2025 remains the same ~ 2025 is over 10 times the amount of 2021.***}

.

Annual Statement for the Year 2025

of the

UNUM LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY OF AMERICA

.

page 23

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That is pretty small, so here are those A & H (Accident and Health) long-term care numbers a little closer:

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Do keep in mind that anything in parentheses ( ) is a loss.

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What the hell just happened in 2025 with the long-term care … and what is it?

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“In an insurer's National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) statutory filing, A&H long-term care designates the specific Accident and Health (A&H) line of business reporting financial data, claims, and long duration contract reserves for policies providing chronic or personal care coverage over a period of 12 consecutive months or longer.”

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Here is the list of those numbers with the three zeroes added back on:

{***maybe not with the three zeroes added, see above note.***}

2021 … -$61,271,236,000

2022 … -$36,950,719,000

2023 … -$26,640,513,000

2024 … -$45,115,508,000

2025 … -$781,315,326,000

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Do you see what I see?

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That looks like well over 700 BILLION {or MILLION?} dollars increased from 2024 to 2025 in losses to Unum for long-term care.

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Do you have another explanation?

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Of late I have been immersing myself in life insurance financial statements. Why would I do that?! … you may ask.

Yes, good question. Other than being a glutton for punishment, it is me trying to understand what this industry can tell us about what happened to this country ~ particularly in the aftermath of the “covid” pandemic.

Did those “safe and effective” punctures in the flesh actually deliver us a better world or not?

Following money trails is almost always a better way to see what is going on than taking any official story at face value. I got started on this thread (at the labyrinth’s edge) with MetLife. Surprisingly, that post has turned out to be one of my most popular offerings to date … over fourteen hundred views! Go figure. I guess this topic can be something other than a sleeping aid.

Somewhere along the way, I took a little tangent. I was digging into the Prudential Life Insurance numbers (death benefits) when the subject of disability claims hit my radar. I ended up doing a separate post about those statistics at Prudential, and I think it did not suck ~ I say this because none other than Sasha Latypova gave it a restack. That level of fellow researcher interaction almost never happens.

It was nice.

Well here I am today poking around yet another poor insurance company’s bank statements … New York Life this time. (I am trying to make the rounds of the “biggies”, you know.) And wow! … these guys have taken the concept of byzantine to a whole new level. When one goes to their financial statement page on the website it is not just a single company, it is several.

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New York Life

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“Financial Information (Statutory Basis) for the

• New York Life Insurance Company,

• New York Life Insurance and Annuity Corporation,

• NYLIFE Insurance Company of Arizona,

• New York Life Group Insurance Company of NY, and

• Life Insurance Company of North America

  is provided below. Annual Statement schedules and Separate Account Annual Statements can be obtained by writing to the Secretary of New York Life Insurance Company, 51 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10010 and specifying which company(s) you are requesting.”

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You have got to know which one of these offshoots to look at, depending on what you want to focus on. Since the thing I was sort of onto now was disability, I gravitated towards the Group incarnation on that list. And then, as you can see, within each company wing there is yet another layer of several choices of reports:

You can just take my word for it that on this list it is the December statutory financial statement we are interested in. That is going to provide a complete year breakdown for 2025 (… or other years).

But once in that document, I started getting lost in the various hallways of data. Because I have become a little more adept in finding the nuances in these behemoths of numbers, I can get distracted looking at one closet of stats for quite some time. One thing leads to another. That being the case, I am not going to even try to tell you everything I found in these New York Life documents in this one post. We will probably have to do a couple of installments.

Okay, what first then?

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Let’s start with something I have not shown you yet. In these annual statutory filings they have a handy Five-Year Historical Data table of key metrics. We’ll go take a peek at that for the group life numbers.

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New York Life Annual Statements

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2025

page 22 & 23

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*I show you that first image just to point out that we need to add three zeroes to all the numbers we find here, but it is really the second page of the historical data that has what we are looking for:

*A little closer:

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Okay so it is line 83 for Group term life, and these are the Net Gains from Operations.

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Losses are in parentheses ( ).

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To get a longer span of time with this data I went to the 2021 annual report and grabbed that same Five-Year Historical Data:

*A little closer:

*though the terminology has slightly changed and it is line 77 in this one, you will notice that the number for 2021 is identical in both versions.

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So let us put that in an easy to look at list now:

.

New York Life Group Insurance

Net Gains from Operations ~ (Group Life)

2017 … +$5,298,168,000

2018 … +$2,058,774,000

2019 … +$6,670,849,000

2020 … -$6,138,009,000

2021 … -$6,530,900,000

2022 … -$1,818,444,000

2023 … +$2,322,343,000

2024 … +$8,154,336,000

2025 … -$680,222,000

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If we may interpret a pre-pandemic norm from these numbers, then 2017 through 2019 saw an average gain in Group Life of $4,675,930,333.

Not a big surprise about those big losses for 2020 and 2021, right?

Here I will say yet again that 2021 trumps 2020 … Oh yes, it’s the Delta variant!

But then we have a strange progression in the following years. Just look at that windfall in 2024! In fact, it is the only year on that list after the pandemic that at least equals the pre-pandemic norm. And sadly, 2025 is a different story … we are starting to slip back into loss territory, albeit on a more modest scale.

What does that all mean anyway?

Pretty sure these numbers are a good measure of how much in claims this insurance company may be paying out in a given year. Anytime you see a loss on that list it almost assuredly means the paid claims outstripped expectations.

Should we be worried about that 2025 number creeping back into the loss column?

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Maybe it is time to go look in another closet a little further down in the maze.

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Now if you remember what I did in that Prudential disability post, there was a separate table in their annual report that I got important disability data from … that was Schedule H - Part 5 - Health Claims.

Let’s try that same thing for this New York Life Group Insurance.

As before, we will have to go to each year’s report and cobble together a list of direct disability claims paid year to year. Again, do not get confused by the column name, even though it is “Disability Income” … the real descriptor is “Claims paid.”

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2025

*A little closer:

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2024

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2023

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2022

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***(Okay, this is where they messed around with the format of the table. It was less detailed prior to 2022. We only get a number in the catchall “Other” column.)

2021

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2020

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2019 ???? … where is it?

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“Yes, that is correct. New York Life did not have its own dedicated group life and disability insurance entity before 2020. [1]

The primary reason you cannot locate statutory filings for a New York Life “group” company for 2019 or earlier is because this business line did not exist within the company’s corporate structure at that time.”

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Okay then, we will just have to make a shorter timeline for this stuff:

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New York Life Group Insurance Company

Direct Claims Paid ~ (Disability)

2020 … $144,305,485

2021 … $157,612,101

2022 … $159,938,004

2023 … $168,650,789

2024 … $174,247,625

2025 … $170,277,136

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If you recall, my research assistant advised that I should be adjusting those pre-2022 “Other” numbers in the case of Prudential. They told me to do that since it was a catch-all column and other things were in those figures … and that a reasonable portion for just the disability claims was around 80%. But we are not going to do that this time with these pre-2022 New York Life numbers. The reason is that this is the specific Group Insurance wing of New York Life, and as such close to 100% of these numbers here are just for disability claims.

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“ … For New York Life Group Insurance Company of NY (NYLGICNY), pre-2022 Schedule H, Part 5 "Other" claims are likely closer to 100% disability, rather than 80%, due to the entity's focus on specialized group disability and life insurance …”

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***the reason that this all changed in 2020 was the fact that New York Life acquired Cigna and then subsequently created its Group Insurance wing.

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Whew!

Believe me, that is a condensed version of what I have been doing.

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Okay, what the hell does that mean?

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Well my take on that list is that since we have no pre-2020 baseline to compare to, we are just going to have to use common sense to interpret what is going on. A reasonable person might think that 2020 was the “shit hits the fan” moment of the entire pandemic ~ and as such, should have one of (if not the biggest) indicators of bad health statistics.

I mean for God’s sake they had no vaccines!

Now we can’t assume anything from the fact that 2020 is the smallest figure on the list.

(Let’s get that list again here.) …

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New York Life Group Insurance Company

Direct Claims Paid ~ (Disability)

2020 … $144,305,485

2021 … $157,612,101

2022 … $159,938,004

2023 … $168,650,789

2024 … $174,247,625

2025 … $170,277,136

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We have no reference point to know just how big a leap that 2020 number is compared to 2019, but we can see that the jump from 2020 to 2021 is the biggest shown … over 13 million dollars.

DELTA VARIANT!!!!!

Just think how bad it would have been without the vaccines!!!!!

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When we get to 2025, we can give a sigh of relief … right? The number is going down compared to the previous year, after all. If that is what we see, we are missing the point …

2020 was the “shit hits the fan” part of the pandemic.

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Why are ALL of the following years on that list SO MUCH LARGER?

2025 going down a wee bit here is like saying the Titanic took on a little less water in the final hour.

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Lest you should think I am cherry-picking or conjuring up a narrative out of thin air, here are some additional things for your consideration.

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Unum is one of the largest group life disability players in the market.

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“ … Within the Unum US operating segment, the group disability line of business reported a 10.6 percent decrease in segment adjusted operating income to $106.6 million in the first quarter of 2026, compared to $119.2 million in the first quarter of 2025. Premium income for the group disability line of business was $809.5 million in the first quarter of 2026, which increased compared to $782.8 million in the first quarter of 2025, due primarily to favorable persistency and prior period sales, partially offset by the expected run off in medical stop-loss premium. Net investment income was $76.0 million in the first quarter of 2026, which was generally consistent compared to $74.0 million in the first quarter of 2025. The benefit ratio for the first quarter of 2026 was 63.7 percent, compared to 61.8 percent in the first quarter of 2025, due to pricing actions, as well as higher incidence in the short-term disability product line. Persistency in the group long-term disability product line was 92.2 percent for the first three months of 2026, compared to 90.7 percent for the first three months of 2025. Persistency in the group short-term disability product line was 90.7 percent for the first three months of 2026, compared to 87.5 percent for the first three months of 2025 …”

Unum Group Reports First Quarter 2026 Results

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The Hartford is another big one in the game.

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“ … Group disability loss ratio of 72.7 increased 3.7 points driven by less favorable long-term disability loss trends and higher short-term disability claim incidence …”

The Hartford Reports First Quarter 2026 Financial Results

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It looks like the disability numbers are starting to go the wrong way … across the board.

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“ … What Is The Driver Of The Disability Insurance Market?

The increasing prevalence of chronic diseases is expected to propel the growth of disability insurance market going forward. Chronic disease refers to a form of illness that lasts for three months or more and can deteriorate with time. As chronic conditions raise the risk of long-term health issues and disabilities, there is a growing demand for disability insurance coverage. The extended lifespan resulting from medical advancements also contributes to a higher incidence of chronic diseases and disabilities, further emphasizing the need for financial protection. The impact on workforce productivity, ongoing medical expenses, and a changing health landscape underscore the relevance of disability insurance. For instance, in April 2025, according to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a US–based public health research organization, in 2023, 76.4% of U.S. adults, equivalent to 194 million people, reported having at least one chronic condition. This prevalence varied by age group, affecting 59.5% of young adults, 78.4% of midlife adults, and 93.0% of older adults. Therefore, the increasing prevalence of chronic diseases is driving the growth of the disability insurance industry.”

The Business Research Company ~ Disability Insurance Market Report 2026

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Supplemental

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The insurance industry began sounding the alarm about elevated incidence and severity in the disability sector during late 2024 and early 2025. [1, 2]

This timing marked a dramatic shift in tone, ending an unusually profitable era for corporate benefit carriers.

## The Timeline of the Shift

* 2021–2023 (The False Calm): During the immediate post-pandemic years, insurance giants like [The Hartford](https://ir.thehartford.com/financials/quarterly-results/) and [Unum](https://investors.unum.com/financials/quarterly-results/default.aspx) actually reported all-time historically low disability incidence. This occurred because massive federal stimulus packages, work-from-home flexibilities, and a delayed medical care backlog kept employees from filing formal claims. [2]

* Late 2024 (The Turning Point): The surge officially broke in financial reporting during the fourth quarter of 2024 (published in January and February 2025). For instance, [The Hartford’s Q4 2024 Earnings Release](https://ir.thehartford.com/news/news-details/2025/The-Hartford-Announces-Outstanding-Results-For-The-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2024/default.aspx) explicitly noted the sudden “emergence of higher long-term disability incidence in 2024” after two years of record lows. Simultaneously, [Unum reported a 3.7% decrease](https://investors.unum.com/news-events/news/news-details/2025/Unum-Group-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-2024-Results/default.aspx) in quarterly group disability operating income as the margins began to tighten. [1, 2]

* 2025–2026 (The Current Baseline): Throughout 2025, actuarial firms and market research groups shifted their projections to reflect this reality. Industry publications like the [2025 Milliman U.S. Group Disability Market Survey](https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/2025-us-group-disability-market-survey-summary) began cataloging how claims were lasting longer—with average long-term claim durations rising from 18 months in 2020 to 24 months by late 2025 due to severity and inflation. [3, 4, 5]

This means that while the underlying chronic health conditions had been building for ten years, the actual financial impact hit the insurance industry’s bottom line precisely at the end of 2024. [2, 6]

If you are researching this for strategic planning, let me know:

* Would you like to review how corporate employer premium rates were modified in response to these 2024 disclosures?

* Do you want to examine how Short-Term Disability vs. Long-Term Disability trends deviated during that specific transition window?

[1] [

https://investors.unum.com

](https://investors.unum.com/news-events/news/news-details/2025/Unum-Group-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-2024-Results/default.aspx)

[2] [

https://ir.thehartford.com

](https://ir.thehartford.com/news/news-details/2025/The-Hartford-Announces-Outstanding-Results-For-The-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2024/default.aspx)

[3] [

https://www.milliman.com

](https://www.milliman.com/en/insight/2025-us-group-disability-market-survey-summary)

[4] [

https://market.us

](https://market.us/report/disability-insurance-market/)

[5] [

https://marketintelo.com

](https://marketintelo.com/report/long-term-disability-insurance-market)

[6] [

https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com

](https://www.thebusinessresearchcompany.com/report/disability-insurance-global-market-report)

.

In the specific U.S. Group Life Insurance market, The Hartford and Unum both rank as Top 10 players, positioning them among the dominant providers of workplace employee benefits. [1, 2, 3]

The industry measures market rankings in two different ways:

## 1. By Group Life Business Issued

This measures the total face value of the new insurance policies a company writes in a given year. In the industry rankings compiled by [AM Best](https://news.ambest.com/newscontent.aspx?refnum=267694&altsrc=9), they rank at the very top of the market:

* Unum: Ranks #3 in the nation (writing over $105 billion in group life business).

* The Hartford: Ranks #4 in the nation (writing over $129 billion in group life business in recent tracking). [4, 5]

## 2. By Premium Market Share

This measures the actual recurring premium dollars collected from employers. According to data tracked by the [Insurance Information Institute (III)](https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-life-insurance) and the [National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC)](https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/research-actuarial-life-fraternal-market-share.pdf):

* The Hartford: Ranks #6 in the U.S. with a 5.0% to 5.3% market share.

* Unum: Ranks #7 in the U.S. with a 4.2% to 4.3% market share. [6, 7]

(Note: They sit just behind corporate giants MetLife, New York Life, and Prudential, who traditionally lead the market). [7, 8]

If you want to evaluate their market strength further, let me know:

* Do you want to see how they rank specifically in Group Disability instead of Group Life?

* Would you like to compare their financial strength ratings (like AM Best or S&P grades)?

[1] [

https://en.wikipedia.org

](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unum)

[2] [

https://investors.unum.com

](https://investors.unum.com/news-events/news/news-details/2021/Unum-ranks-in-the-top-100-of-Forbes-Best-Employers-for-Diversity-2021-List-04-22-2021/default.aspx)

[3] [

https://www.workerscompensationshop.com

](https://www.workerscompensationshop.com/workers-comp-information/the-hartford-coverage-comparison)

[4] [