Question

Medical insurance is usually charged based on the health factors as well as the number of dependencies of the beneficiary. Body mass index (bmi) is an important health index.

use SAS to answer : (please write the code in SAS only)

1- How does bmi depend on the residential region of the beneficiaries.

2- How do insurance charges depend on the beneficiary’s smoking habit and their number of children.

Variable Description

age: Age of the primary beneficiary

sex: insurance contractor

gender: (female/ male)

bmi : Body mass index, providing an understanding of body, weights that are relatively high or low relative to height, objective index of body weight (kg / m) using the ratio of height to weight, ideally 18.5 to 24.9

weight_range : Weight classification according to bmi (underweigh(bmi < 18.5)/healthy (18.5 ≤ bmi < 25)/overweigh(25 ≤ bmi < 30)/ obese(bmi ≥ 30))

children: Number of children covered by health insurance / Number of dependents smoker

Smoking: (yes/no)

region: the beneficiary’s residential area in the US, northeast, southeast, southwest, northwest

charges: Individual medical costs billed by health insurance

Answer 1

1)  Body Mass Index (BMI) of a person is calculated by weight divided by the square of height. If a person has high BMI, it means he has high body fatness which is not good for health.  BMI help us to check the weight categories that can cause health problems. For medical insurance BMI depends on the residential region of the beneficiaries. The lower the socioeconomic status the higher is the BMI or vice-versa. Residential area provides an estimate of social and economic circumstances of the beneficiaries. Socio economic circumstances(SES) and BMI are dependent on the method used to measure SES. These variation depends on the sex , income and age. However, only some variables remained associated with important differences by sex. Living in urban areas was associated with higher BMI than in rural areas. Example, urban areas in Mexico have higher obesity for both men and women but in developed countries, obesity is higher in rural areas. BMI is valid within the 10 and 59 kg/m2 range and height between 1.3 and 2.0 meters.

2) Insurance charges depend on some factors like age, sex, number of children, BMI and whether smoking or not etc. insurance companies will increase the premiums i.e they will be charged more specially for smokers or for those who use tobacco products. Sometimes they charged up to 50 % or more than non-smokers. A recent study shows that a 45 year old male smoker has to pay 100 to 300% more than a nonsmoker for a 20-year, $500,000 life insurance policy.

For a health insurance cost, the number of children might charge more on a plan.  Normally when we add a spouse or child onto a plan, the monthly payment or premium increases. This is because they've charged for each person covered by the plan. But in a family if there are more than three children under the age of 21 , there will be charges only for the oldest three children, and no charges for their two youngest children.