Mr. Goulekas: I'll break the group into a few pieces'' life and annuity, group pension, and A&H'' but let's start with the life piece of it. The growth has primarily been in high net worth estate planning products and products designed to get to the middle market. If you think of it as traditionally selling mortality protection, the great middle market buys the majority of that at the workplace. Whether they buy a term product, if they're very young, or a sponsored product in the workplace, it is a traditional agent-sold, general account-based mortality product which is growing less than 5%. Some of these numbers I'm going to give you, by the way, are based on our Conning model, which has about 500 statutory life companies in it, and it is a five-year model, both historically and going forward. Estate planning is starting to gear up for the baby boomers. Most of the baby boomers are still in the transition from retirement savings to estate planning; we're seeing some pretty good growth in the UL and variable UL products, generally growing over 10% when we look at the subset of who does that. I think most will tell you that the mortality protection for the middle market is still under-penetrated. In the high net worth market, big demand is yet to come as the transition occurs to estate planning. And the small face amount market has been a little bit tougher to grow. It's fragmented across career agents, very often called home service '' direct mail and TV and also funeral homes for pre-need type policies '' and the growth rate is generally well below 10% in each of those categories. If you look at the aggregate for the group in terms of premium, it's been in the high single-digits, and we don't see it changing a whole lot for the next few years. Specialization in the strong areas that I talked about has gotten several companies into the low to mid-double-digit growth rate, but that will probably be the extent of what we would expect to see over the next few years. On the annuity side, we've seen fairly strong growth in qualified and non- qualified annuities. It's been a stronger segment, we believe, than a lot of people have predicted. It isn't just a bull market phenomenon. The qualified annuity segment, in particular, tend to be a double-digit grower, often with the sources of revenue being traditional spread business. It's been a very good market for spreads with falling interest rates. As you would expect, companies are lowering their credited rates faster than their portfolio yields, which tends to be five plus years in duration. Right now has been a good time because investment spreads, the default spread on corporates, have widened. But with CD rates down, credited rates on annuities have followed shorter-term investments down. It's also been a good market '' despite the naysayers '' for variable annuities, both qualified and non-qualified. Those companies that have distribution and scale have proven that you can grow at a very rapid rate. We expect that market to be a double-digit grower, as well. Fears of a price war cutting into margins have been overblown, partly because size has allowed annuity companies to have better administrative costs and purchasing power with the sub-advisors, the mutual funds. So size does translate into a better cost structure, which has preserved margin for those that are large. With the HMOs primarily dominating health these days, the accident and health line of business is mostly disability, including group and individual and cancer. Group sales of disability have been very strong. This is due to a strong labor market and a strong economy. Layoffs make group disability vulnerable to an increase in new cases. As the larger companies start initiating layoffs, as we've seen in every economic downcycle, there is a corresponding increase in cases. The 'walking wounded,' in essence, go on disability while they can, before they're laid off '' and we're starting to see some signals of that. The individual disability market is still rather lackluster. The mutuals in particular still sell the products, which are non-cancellable, non-occupation products, that appeal to the lawyers and doctors who dominate that market. The stock companies, primarily UNUM (UNM) and Provident (PVT), tried to go a different route, and their slow growth rates have shown that. They're making a bet that scale will count more than just selling the same old products that the mutuals do. The group pension market has actually done better for insurance companies over the last few years than I had expected. The insurers have carved out a small and middle market niche where distribution, service, administration, and a tie-in to group life sales is as important, or more so, as investment performance. The big pensions go for the investment performance, which is primarily the large mutual funds. This market has been growing in the 10% range, which has been not too bad, and it is generally in the fee-side separate-account products.
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