Coventry First is going to court to try to find out why Lapetus Solutions, a life expectancy forecaster, is gloomy about how long people will live.
The life settlement market player is suing in a state court in Leon County, Florida, for access to the reports that Lapetus files with the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation.
Florida requires Lapetus and other life expectancy estimate providers to submit reports, including life expectancy estimate audits, every three years.
Coventry has asked Florida regulators to let it see the Lapetus filings. Florida regulators said they could not provide the filings because Lapetus has classified its filings as trade secrets, according to a petition Coventry filed last week.
Representatives from Lapetus were not immediately available to comment on the suit.
Lapetus has argued in the past that it uses many sophisticated data sources and methods, including analytical strategies based on artificial intelligence, under the direction of Dr. Jay Olshansky, a widely published professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Illinois Chicago.
What it means: If Coventry succeeds, people who want to know more about life expectancy forecasting may be able to read Florida's life expectancy provider filings.
The backdrop: The life settlement market gives people insured by some types of life insurance policies a chance to sell the policies to investors. Policies covering people who are likely to die soon sell for higher prices than policies covering young, healthy people who seem likely to stay alive for many years.
In recent years, forces such as COVID-19 and opioid use have complicated mortality forecasting.
Life settlement market players may think use of overly pessimistic life expectancy forecasts gives competitors a way to justify paying too much for policies.
The Lapetus effect: Coventry hired analysts to compare Lapetus life expectancies with estimates from other life expectancy forecasters for a batch of 4,000 policies.
The analysts found that the Lapetus estimates were shorter than the others in about 83% of all cases, by an average of about 29 months, according to Coventry.
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