Archive for December, 2009

Climate change and global warming. Topics that can ignite debate among educated scientists as well as politicians and those who elect them. Stephen Schnieder, a climate scientist, writing for The Huffington Post, summarized the global warming debate quite well:

“The past 40 years, when attached at the end of a reconstruction of the temperatures of the past 1000 years, look like a bit like a “hockey stick” with a wavy handle but a “blade” that rises above the climatic history of the millennium and exhibits the warmest decades in the record in the past 30 or so years. This reconstruction has been the object of intense arguments between the climatologists who constructed the hockey stick and some skeptical attackers who claimed it was erroneous.”

As the second Friday of December passes us by and we head off for the weekend (dome of us anyways), keep in mind there are only twenty days left until the end of the year.

End of the year is the perfect time to review your company’s business insurance. It is a good time to make sure that equipment purchased during the year is insured. It is a good time to make sure that automobiles and their drivers are properly identified. Update procedure manuals, review wellness plans, meet with your insurance professional–these and other steps are perfectly suited for the end of the year because the steps coincide with tax planning.

Zurich in North America has created an electronic library of risk management and product information. Zurich calls it: the Zurich Virtual Literature Rack (VLR).

The VLR contains information relevant to risk managers, customers, and those looking to purchase business insurance. The VLR requires registration and the information requested is a bit invasive, but that is probably my only complaint. I have always liked RiskInsight, a publication produced by Zurich that covers different types of risks in each issue. That publication is available in the VLR for direct viewing or downloading.

Always on the look out for ways to keep business insurance interesting, I came across a video at insurancejournal.com that illustrates the importance of planning and creating proper written procedures. Planning for risks and creating procedures in advance to reduce risk are the best ways to reduce the cost of business insurance.

Just ask the people at Gatorland. As a part of its video series “Watching the Risks,” Insurance Journal posted a video interview with Tim Williams, Gatorland’s dean of gator wrestling, discussing the ways Gatorland manages risk. The video is great, not only because of the great shots of gators, but because of the lesson it teaches on the importance of risk planning.

Yesterday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a statement on the “Benefits of Health Reform for Businesses.” A copy of the Statement is available online with links to supporting documentation.

Secretary Sebelius states that a November 30 letter to Senator Evan Bayh from the Congressional Budget Office on the impact of the Patient Protection and Affordability Acts supports claims from legislators that “[s]mall businesses are likely to see premiums drop by 1 to 4 percent under the proposal.”



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