Cavalcade of Risk: Life happens

January 23rd, 2013 by Julie Ferguson

Life is just plain risky. Welcome to the biweekly grab-bag of risk related issues. We are pleased to be hosting this week’s 127th roundup. As a theme, we’ve chosen to intersperse our entries with a humorous look at risk via a few clever clever insurance commercials from the Netherlands insurance firm Centraal Beheer (hat tip to Consumer Insurance Blog for the levity.)

We open this week’s posts with an entry from our fearless leader and Cavalcade founder, Hank Stern. What’s on his mind this week at InsureBlog? Risky Bulbs. He highlights (ahem) reports that those newfangled curly bulbs may be a lot more dangerous than we’d thought, increasing one’s risk of burns and exposure to UV radiation.
If you require any medical treatment after your encounter with the hazardous bulbs, you may be in fro sticker shock. Jaan Sidorov of The Disease Management Care Blog posts about hos The $5 Billion Price Tag for medication errors and injectable drugs.
The good news is that even if your treatment is expensive, at least you should be able to get good care. At Health Business Blog, David Williams dispels the myth that there is a nursing shortage. He tells us that there’s oversupply right now and with technological change there’s reason to believe no shortage will ever arise.
In thinking about hospital care, one might wonder how they manage their own costs for healthcare… Jason Shafrin, The Healthcare Economist investigates how much money hospitals spend insuring their own workers.
At Colorado Health Insurance Insider, Louise takes a sobering look at health insurance costs to the individual under the ACA. She explains in detail why it is likely that costs will go up substantially.
My Wealth Builder looks at his own experience in maximizing insurance benefits and minimizing out-of-pocket costs, sharing what he’s learned in Insurance Out-of-Pocket Cost Management.

Moving away from medical and healthcare risk and into other insurance and finance matters…
This week, we celebrated the pageantry of the presidential inauguration – an event that pleased many but not all of our fellow citizens. Democracy is messy. But Russell Hutchinson, our favorite blogger from down-under, gives us an object lesson in why we should be grateful that we live in a democracy in his post Supervision of the Insurance Industry – Fijian Style.
Not that our own insurance system isn’t sometimes very flawed. At his Insurance Claims and Bad Faith Law Blog, Dennis Wall posts that refusing to pay valid Sandy claims is just bad faith. He notes that at least one Representative changed from a nay to a yea vote after seeing with his own eyes how Sandy made needy victims out of so many people and businesses.
Insurers can improve their chances of a good outcome when following the Boy Scout motto of being prepared. At Workers Comp Roundup , Rebecca Shafer posts about implementing electronic claims management systems to gather all information necessary for high quality claims management.
And here at Workers’ Comp Insider, we deal with the risks of getting old. At My colleague Jon points out that our century-old workers’ comp system is poorly equipped to handle the increasing numbers of older workers in the modern workforce.

In this final segment of our risk review, Ken Faulkenberry of the AAAMP Blog suggests that a good risk control approach is to focus on what you can control, good advice for life in general, as well as for your investment portfolio.
At the eponymously named Life Insurance By Jeff blog, Jeff Rose reminds us that coverage needs change throughout fluctuations in jobs and life situations. A 15-year term life policy might be a better option than a lifetime policy.
Does everyone need life insurance? What about someone who has no income to replace? Jacob @ My Personal Finance Journey makes the case for why homemakers should have life insurance – and plenty of it!
That wraps up this edition. Keep an eye out for the next issue of Cavalcade of Risk, which will be hosted by Dennis Wall at Insurance Claims & Issues.