One threshold, set to the rule
Tighten the match and real deaths slip through, each a cost the book still owes. Loosen it and living people are flagged as dead: a frozen policy, a suspended annuity, a member disenrolled while alive and eligible. One threshold trades one error for the other, and no setting removes both.
Illustrative model·Synthetic data, no real records
The overlap
Two populations, one threshold, two ways to be wrong.
02The book
Regulatory basis RUUPA · state law
match weight, low to high
Caught deaths
Missed deaths
Wrongly flagged living
Correctly left alone
Shaded: the defensible band. Its loose edge holds the living share of declared deaths within tolerance; its tight edge meets the death-catch duty. The defensible point is the tight edge.
Missed deaths / yr
0
$0
Wrongful determinations / yr
0
$0
Match threshold52 / 100
Drag the line above or this slider. Tighter misses more deaths; looser flags more living people.
Book size1.5M enrollees
Scales the stakes to your book. Deaths track the program's age-weighted mortality for a book this size; look-alikes track an illustrative collision rate. Data quality sets how cleanly the two separate, not how many there are.
Weight on a wrongful flag
Data quality
How cleanly the identifiers separate true deaths from look-alikes. A verified identifier and full date of birth pull them apart; name and birth year alone leave them overlapping. Narrows the overlap, never closes it.
Total annual cost
$0
The cost-minimum moves with how heavily a wrongful determination is weighed. Priced at operational cost it sits at the loosest, cheapest match. Priced as the regulation prices it, it moves tighter, until the death-catch duty holds it at the defensible point. The distance between the two is a methodology choice an institution accounts for, not a number a vendor supplies.
| Input | Basis | Source | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Score distributions | Fellegi-Sunter match weights on name, date of birth, geography, identifier | § Fellegi-Sunter | Illustrative |
| Wrongful-flag duty | quarterly Death Master File check from 2027; erroneous disenrollment reenrolled backdated | § OBBBA §71104 | Cleared |
| Wrongful-flag harm | thousands of living people wrongly listed in the Death Master File each year, fewer than 0.3% of 3M+ death reports | § SSA OIG | Cleared |
| Look-alike population | name and date-of-birth collision at population scale | Modeling assumption | Illustrative |
| Missed-death cost | per-case cost of an uncaught death | Capture-rate model | Illustrative |
| Wrongful-determination cost | reinstatement, remediation, regulatory exposure | Modeling assumption | Assumption |
| Scope | The wrongful-flag harm is counted as people; it does not reduce to a dollar. Figures are modeled to show the shape of the trade. Set them to a book in an engagement. | ||
Illustrative model, no real records·Same inputs reproduce the same result