Executives Brief Wall Street on Death

What You Need to Know

Reinsurance Group of America sees death still about 3% higher than in 2019.
That could mean about 90,000 extra U.S. deaths this year.
Problems with forecasting mortality linger and could affect financial plans based on life expectancy assumptions.

The U.S. mortality rate is falling, and life insurers can handle it, but it’s still noticeably higher than it was in 2019, before COVID-19 came to light.

The excess mortality level continues to be high enough that life insurers and reinsurers think about it when pricing coverage.

“I think we’re at about 3% to 4% excess relative to pre-pandemic levels for the first half of this year,” Jonathan Porter, the chief risk officer at Reinsurance Group of America, said Aug. 2, during a conference call the Chesterfield, Missouri-based company held to go over second-quarter earnings with securities analysts.

RGA is a reinsurer, or insurance company for insurance companies. It protects life and annuity issuers against catastrophic mortality risk and other forms of risk, such as pension plan and annuity longevity risk.

About 2.8 million people died in the United States in 2019. If the U.S. excess mortality rate stays at 3% to 4% for a full year, that would imply that the country would experience about 84,000 to 112,000 extra deaths.

The chief financial officer at Globe Life talked about the lingering high mortality rate during a conference call the company held in July to go over second-quarter earnings. The Globe Life CFO gave no numbers.

Two kidney dialysis companies, DaVita and Fresenius, serve people who are especially vulnerable to COVID, flu and the effects of health care system strain. They are seeing the increase in mortality affecting patient volume.