How Anthem got caught

You probably know about the Woodland Hills health insurer proposing to boost rates by up to 39 percent on individual policyholders - and then having to sharply lower those hikes after errors were found in its formulations. What you probably don't know is that the errors were discovered by David Axene, a 60-year-old actuary who was crunching the numbers while seriously ill in a hospital bed. As described by the LAT, "there he was sifting through spreadsheets on his laptop, cradling his cellphone to his ear, waving off doctors to finish another conference call."

Axene and his actuaries set about reviewing Anthem's proposal and more than 1,000 pages of internal documents and Excel spreadsheets filled with columns of numbers and formulas and equations -- a mind-numbing mound of data that produced a stack of paper 18 inches high. "This was a brain stretcher," he said. "It may be the most intense project we've ever worked on." Axene relied not only on his math skills but also on a higher power: He prayed for insight and wisdom each morning before launching into another round of numbers sleuthing, often drawing inspiration from a worn Bible he keeps in his office.

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A month into the investigation, Axene came down with what he thought was the flu. Tests turned up a blood infection that could have proved fatal. He landed in a Wildomar emergency room and was soon undergoing surgery to drain the infection from his left knee. He was weak and couldn't lift himself out of bed. But he refused to back off from the Anthem investigation, logging 66 hours of work in the hospital the week after his surgery. With an intravenous line in one hand and a cellphone in the other, he continued to sort through Anthem spreadsheets on his laptop that was propped on a portable table over his bed.