R&R Insurance Blog

While this time of year brings sunshine and warmer temps, it also comes with the potential of tornadoes and severe weather. Homeowners, renters, business and vehicle owners can find themselves in a financially challenging situation following a spring storm if they haven't checked their insurance coverage carefully.

An article from Property Casualty 360, provides a checklist of best practices for protecting your assets during this season of storms.

1. Verify your home is insured for its current value.
2. Find out what kind of home insurance policy you have.
3. Find out if you have a specific deductible in the event of a tornado or windstorm.
4. Understand the claims process before you have to make a claim.
5. Does your policy have any special limits or policy features?
6. Prepare an inventory of the contents in your home, including contents in additional structures like tool or garden sheds.
7. Find out what kind of coverage you have if there is a power failure.
8. Find out what your limit is for Additional Living Expenses (ALE) and how you can expect the coverage to work.
9. Make sure your car insurance includes comprehensive coverage, for damage such as hail, falling objects and windstorms.
10. Ask if you have coverage for a rental car if your car needs repairs.
11. If you have a vehicle in storage, make sure you haven't forgotten about coverage while it's there.
12. If you sustain storm damage, contact your insurer as soon as possible and start the claims filing process. For customers of R&R, we recommend adding our CSR24 phone number, as well as the phone number for your insurance carrier to your cell phone. This will ensure you have information at your fingertips should an emergency arise. Feel free to contact your Personal Lines agent for assistance!

For more information about properly protecting your family and the assets you've worked so hard to acquire, contact a member of our Personal Lines team.

Choosing generic drugs over the brand name is generally less expensive. However, many people question whether generic drugs are as good, effective or safe as their brand name counterparts. The perception is that since many generic items found in grocery stores tend to be of lesser quality, the same must be true for medications. Fortunately, in the case of prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) medications, generic substitutes are the equivalent of brand name drugs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates the chemical equivalency of generic drugs to ensure they are just as safe and effective as the brand name drugs they mimic.

“Employees who understand their benefit plans make more informed choices about the medical services they receive, and that benefits everyone.”

Talk to Your Doctor

The best way to ensure that you know all you can about a drug you have been prescribed, and its generic equivalents, is to talk openly with your doctor. Below are some suggested questions that you may want to ask.

• Is there a generic substitute for this drug available?
• Are there any drug interactions that I should be aware of?
• Does this medication cause any side effects?
• If I forget to take a dose, what should I do?

Also, make sure your doctor knows about any previous reactions you have had to medications. In addition, be sure to call your doctor immediately if you have any problems or adverse side effects from a new prescription. Choosing generic drugs when available, following your doctor’s and pharmacist’s instructions fully, and talking openly with your doctor will help you make the most of our prescription drug plan. These strategies can help you not only save money on the prescription itself, but also avoid future health problems that could be costly.

To know more about generic and brand name drugs, read here.

Source: Zywave

Cyber criminals, for the purposes of extortion, can threaten to shut down computer systems or erase data, infect a company with a virus, publish private information or personally identifiable information on customers or employees, institute a denial-of-service attack or take over social media. There are numerous examples of these attacks happening day in and day out, to businesses of all sizes.

Travelers has provided the following checklist to help protect businesses from cyber crime:

1. Know your data. A company cannot fully know how much is at risk until they understand the nature and the amount of data they have.

2. Create file back-ups, data back-ups and back-ups bandwidth abilities. This will help a company to retain its information in the event that extortion occurs.

3. Train employees to recognize spear phishing. All employees should learn the importance of protecting the information they regularly handle to help reduce exposure to the business.

4. Do background checks on employees. Background checking employees can help identify whether they have criminal pasts.

5. Limit administrative capabilities for systems and social footprint. The less employees with access to sensitive information, the better.

6. Ensure systems have appropriate firewall and antivirus technology. After the appropriate software is in place, evaluate the security settings on software, browser and email programs. In doing so, select system options that will meet your business needs without increasing risk.

7. Have data breach prevention tools, including intrusion detection. Ensure employees are actually monitoring the detection tools. It is important to not only try to prevent a breach, but to make sure that if a breach occurs, the company is aware as soon as possible. Time is of the essence.

8. Update security software patches in a timely manner. Regularly maintaining security protections on your operating system is vital to them being effective over time.

9. Include DDoS security capabilities. It is important to have the ability to avoid or absorb attacks meant to overwhelm or degrade your systems.

10. Put a plan in place to manage a data breach. If a breach occurs, there should be a clear protocol outlining which employees are part of the incident response team and their roles and responsibilities.

11. Protect your business with insurance coverage designed to address cyber risks. Cyber insurance coverage typically provides protection for costs associated with data breaches and extortion events. The right insurance program will also provide access to skilled professionals to manage the event from start to finish.

Attend our upcoming Cyber Seminar to learn more about protecting your business.

Last year was a pivotal year for our customers and our associates here at R&R Insurance.  In 2017, we partnered with one of our carriers, West Bend Mutual, to utilize their in-house Service Team for all of our West Bend Mutual Personal Lines clients.

This added service comes at no additional cost to our insureds and provides customers with immediate answers to billing questions, making changes to policies, expanded hours of transactional service and reporting of claims. In addition, this change allows R&R more time to take on the role of advisor, counselor and claim advocate on our clients' behalf. Below is just one of the many examples of how the Service Center approach is benefiting our customers. 

Service Center Benefits

Konnie has been a licensed agent in Personal Lines with R&R Insurance since 2002. One of Konnie’s clients added a vehicle to his policy several years ago - something he didn't do frequently.  Konnie reviewed the change after it was processed and called the client to confirm. In doing so, she noticed there was a relatively new and important coverage (Car Damage Replacement Cost) missing from the policy. The endorsement provides insureds a new car (with some limitations) should the car be totaled out without any depreciation. The coverage was added to the policy after Konnie’s review for approximately $6 per month.

Fast forward 4 years and about 68,000 miles, when our client was involved in a pretty serious accident. Fortunately, our client walked away with only minor bumps and bruises.  However, his 2015 Lexus was not so lucky - a total loss. The claim was submitted and his insurance carrier promptly paid the claim for his vehicle. However, because of a human error on their part, they only paid out on the depreciated value of the car.  Konnie, who followed-up to make sure the claim was moving along promptly and fairly, caught this error.  Our insured was happy to find out he would be receiving a supplemental check from his insurance carrier that next day for over $14,000!  While we obviously do our best to insure these errors don't occur in the first place, we are fortunate to have dedicated time for our Service Agents to act as advocates, advisors, and counselors for our customers. 

R&R Insurance will continue to be here for you and will always remember that our job is to make sure that we place you with only the best insurance companies. This change is just one example of how R&R is able to better serve our customers. Thank all of for allowing us to be your insurance agency, your advocate and your advisor.

As prescription drug costs continue to increase, it is important for employers to understand the trends behind cost of prescription drugs and what they can do to better manage their health care expenses. By taking the time to understand prescription drug trends and how the ACA is impacting the pharmaceutical industry, employers may be able to identify ways to reduce health care expenditures.

In 2014, prescription drug spending in the United States increased 13.1 percent—the largest increase since 2003. This jump was due to a number of factors—a major one being a 30.9 percent increase in spending on specialty medications, which are high-cost drugs used to treat complicated conditions like hepatitis C, cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. The growth in prescription spending was also due to more people being insured and gaining prescription drug coverage as a result of the Affordable Cart Act (ACA).

The IRS has released updated tax withholding tables that employers must use in 2018. The new tables reflect the changes made by the tax reform law—which was enacted December of 2017. Employers do not need to obtain new W-4 forms from employees.

According to the IRS, Notice 1036 is the first in a series of steps that the agency will take to help employers improve the accuracy of their tax withholdings by the a new tax reform law, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, enacted on Dec. 22, 2017.

The IRS will issue more withholding guidance in 2018. Employers should become familiar with the new tables and begin using them as soon as possible, but no later than Feb. 15, 2018. Employers should also monitor the IRS’s Notice 1036 website for future guidance regarding income-tax withholding under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

For more in-depth information, read here, or contact a Knowledge Broker at 800.566.7007.

Do you know what the following people have in common?

Amy Pascal, Greg Steinhafel, Frank Blake, Richard Smith, Noel Biderman

All were CEOs of companies that lost their jobs following a data breach/hacking of their respective companies.

• Amy Pascal was CEO of Sony Pictures.  The company settled a class action lawsuit for $15 million
• Greg Steinhafel was CEO of Target.  They settled class action lawsuits for $50 million
• Frank Blake was CEO of Home Depot.  The company paid $27.25 million to banks, $134 million to Visa, MC and more banks, $19 million in class action settlements
• Richard Smith was CEO of Equifax.  Suits are still pending at time of publishing
• Noel Biderman was CEO of Ashley Madison. They paid $11.2 million to settle claims

The expense of dealing with a data breach can add up quickly.  Take, for example, a hospital that experienced a breach of 40,000 records.  The price tag was $450,000 for credit monitoring and ID Theft insurance, $175,000 in notification and call center expenses, $25,000 forensics costs and $90,000 in legal costs, and $500,000 in regulatory fines.

In another instance, a former hospital employee downloaded 102,000 patient records.  The expenses amounted to $1.4 million in credit monitoring & call center, $500,000 in notification expenses, $500,000 legal expenses, $250,000 forensics, $1.5 million in legal expenses and $750,000 in regulatory fines.

Many companies were impacted by the Petya/NotPetya malware in 2017.  Consider a full day without phones, six days without email, nearly two weeks without complete access to documents, and  $700,000 in lost billings.  That’s what happened when this malware hit a global law firm.  What lessons did they learn?  With ransomware, detection comes too late; everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face; no firm is immune. Globally the malware cost $1.5 billion, including companies such as  FedEx which posted a $200 million loss and Maersk  which posted a $300 million loss, to name just a few.

All companies are at risk regardless of size, industry, or location.  How do you offset the staggering amounts that a cyber event can cost your company?  Invest in risk management, cyber security, and cyber insurance.

One of the challenges that businesses have in protecting themselves from cyber attacks is keeping up with patching vulnerabilities.  In 2017 we saw in both the WannaCry  and the Petya/NotPetya events how quickly malware can spread globally through un-patched, unsupported software.

This week, major computer design flaws have been identified.  Here is a good explanation from KnowBe4, Inc. of the issue:

"Computer researchers have recently found out that the main chip in most modern computers—the CPU—has a hardware bug. It's really a design flaw in the hardware that has been there for years. This is a big deal because it affects almost every computer on our network, including your workstation and all our servers.

This hardware bug allows malicious programs to steal data that is being processed in your computer memory. Normally, applications are not able to do that because they are isolated from each other and the operating system. This hardware bug breaks that isolation.

So, if the bad guys are able to get malicious software running on your computer, they can get access to your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents. Not good.

So, What Are We Doing About This?

We need to update and patch all machines on the network. This is going to take some time, some of the patches are not even available yet. We also may have to replace some mission-critical computers to fix this.

In the meantime, we need you to be extra vigilant, with security top of mind and Think Before You Click."

This impacts not only corporate computers and desktops, but also smartphones and internet servers.   Intel, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Firefox have either released fixes or will be soon.  

Many employee benefits are subject to annual dollar limits that are periodically increased for inflation. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently announced cost-of-living adjustments to the annual dollar limits for various welfare and retirement plan limits for 2018. Although some of the limits will remain the same, many of the limits will increase for 2018.

The annual limits for the following commonly offered employee benefits will increase for 2018:

• High deductible health plans (HDHPs) and health savings accounts (HSAs); 
• Health flexible spending accounts (FSAs);
• Transportation fringe benefit plans; and
• 401(k) plans.

Employers should update their benefit plan designs for the new limits and also make sure that their plan administration will be consistent with the new limits in 2018. Employers may also want to communicate the new benefit plan limits to employees in connection with annual open enrollment.

Click here to download the Benefit Plan Limits for 2018

Or contact a Knowledge Broker for more information.

Today's modern vehicles have electronics throughout; in the doors, under the seats, behind the dashboard, in the engine and even in the trunk. With so many electronics susceptible to flood-related failure, most cars that take on water cannot be be repaired.

Leaders Edge Magazine describes the steps you should take to ensure a used vehicle does not have a history of water damage. While there is no sure way to know if a vehicle has been damaged by a flood, the National Automobile Dealers Association offers these tips to prospective buyers to spot flood-damaged vehicles:

• Check a vehicle’s title history using the National Insurance Crime Bureau’s VinCheck, the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System or a commercially available vehicle history report service, such as Experian or Carfax, etc. Reports may state whether a vehicle has been flood damaged.

• Examine the interior and the engine compartment for evidence of water and grit from suspected submersion.

• Check for recently shampooed carpeting.

• Look under the carpeting for water residue or stain marks from evaporated water not related to air-conditioning pan leaks.

• Inspect for interior rust and under the carpeting, and inspect upholstery and door panels for evidence of fading.

• Check under the dash for dried mud and residue, and note any mold or a musty odor in the upholstery, carpet or trunk.

• Check for rust on screws in the console and in other areas water would normally not reach unless the vehicle was submerged.

• Look for mud or grit in alternator crevices, behind wiring harnesses and around the small recesses of starter motors, power steering pumps and relays.

• Inspect electrical wiring for rusted components, water residue or suspicious corrosion.

• Inspect other components for rust or flaking metal not normally found in late-model vehicles.

Contact a KnowledgeBroker for additional information.