If you are a doctor, lawyer, or other related professional, you know that there is a certain level of risk you undertake in your career. You may be very good at what you do and have a stellar record, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a chance that a mistake could happen. That’s why protecting yourself with malpractice insurance is important for your career.

When it comes to buying malpractice insurance, it’s important that you have the right amount of liability coverage. However, it’s also equally as important that you purchase it from an insurance broker whom you trust.

Below is a guideline with tips to help make the process of purchasing malpractice insurance much easier.

1. The first thing you’ll want to do when buying malpractice insurance is to find an insurance agent or broker who understands your specific needs.

2. Make sure you feel comfortable dealing and communicating with an insurance broker. Remember that you will be giving them your private information, so you want someone who is very trustworthy and makes client service a priority.

3. The insurance provider you get should have a stable background and have a history of paying out claims.

4. If a broker recommends a particular type of coverage, make sure to study the policy. Read the fine print and ask questions if are not clear about what is or what is not covered. There are many types of insurance coverage, so it’s important that you know what you’re getting into.

5. Don’t buy a policy just because it’s cheap. Keep in mind that you get what you pay for. It’s possible that you could be settling for insufficient coverage or inferior service.

If you follow this simple guideline, you should have no problem getting the insurance coverage you need for your situation.

Insurance is best described as cover against any given risk. Small businesses require such cover because, accidents are bound to happen at any one given time. When you go to the insurance broker, you will be made aware of all the different policies that relate to small businesses. Paying premiums is not the ultimate guarantee that the insurance company is going to repay you once the enterprise is hit by some crisis.

For example, the insurer, or the insurance company for that matter, cannot repay the enterprise for losses incurred through lack of proper management of the venture. However, it may repay if the losses are as a result of fire, if this is what the premiums were for. The company will pay up to a specific amount that is calculated based on the worth of the enterprise and the premiums that the enterprise commits towards the insurance policy.

Some of assets that can be insured in the venture include the buildings. Note, however, that you can only insure them if you are the real owner of the premises. Rented or leased building cannot be insured in the name of the enterprise. In the case of lease, your landlord should be the one to provide this insurance cover. Property that belongs to the enterprise also need to be insured. These include desks, tables, chairs and equipment.

Some of the risks that a small business can insure against include fire, floods and earthquakes and loss of income for the employee. Loss of income for employees may occur through disability acquired during the call of duty. This means that you need to have an insurance policy for workman compensation in case of injury at work.

If you are in the market to purchase your own health insurance coverage you can save yourself precious time and money by shopping and comparing policies right online. Sites dedicated to giving you quotes on various types of insurance make it very easy for you to get an idea of what your coverage and costs will be. However, please be forewarned that there are some pitfalls in using an insurance broker as I discovered within the past year.

As a self employed person, I carry my own health and life insurance for my family. When making the move from New Jersey to North Carolina in 2004 I knew two things about our health insurance:

1. I would have to shop for a health insurance provider covering North Carolina.

2. Rates would be cheaper than in New Jersey, with costs being about half of what I had been paying and with slight better coverage.

Several weeks before we moved I contacted a well known internet insurance broker and received quotes. We selected one company and received the paperwork from the broker about ten days before our move. Quite frankly, I wish I had started the process a little earlier as all of our free time was dedicated toward preparing and making the move. So, I ended up packing the paperwork with my personal stuff and was only able to fill it out and submit it one week after our arrival in North Carolina.

Dealing with the online insurance broker was a simple task, but I soon discovered that they were an extra step in the application process, one that only slowed down our approval.

Once the paperwork was received by the broker, they acknowledged the same via email and mentioned that they would review our package before forwarding it to the health insurance company.

Over the next couple of weeks we received messages from the insurance broker stating the following:

1. We are in the process of reviewing your application.

2. We have sent your application off to the insurance company.

3. The insurance company has your application and will be reviewing it in about one week.

4. The insurance company expects a delay in reviewing your application due to the high volume of applications received.

5. Please do not contact the insurance company directly; we will keep you posted as to the status of your application. Yeah, right.

Originally, we were assured by the insurance broker that the health insurance company would review and approve our application within two weeks. Follow up phone calls by us to the broker along with several exchanges of emails revealed that this was not going to happen. In addition, when we contacted the health insurance company directly – at the encouragement of the broker – the health insurance company had difficulty finding our application. Within a few days the application was found sitting in another department; our contact at the health insurance company blamed the broker for sending the information to the wrong address.

As it turned out, the original insurance quote we received online was off by just over 20%. Once the health insurance company determined that certain pre existing conditions needed to be factored in our rates rose accordingly. Of course, when working with the internet broker we knew that the rate quoted wasn’t ‘absolute’ but the big jump was still a bitter pill to swallow.

Among our thoughts at that point in the process were:

1. Had we known ahead of time that our “final rate” would be so high, we would have shopped around some more.

2. Because of the delays and the passage of time, we needed to complete the application process as our coverage with the NJ health provider would need to be canceled, preferably by the end of the year.

By the middle of December, a full ten weeks after we submitted our paperwork, we received official notification that our application was approved and that we were covered. During the last couple of weeks of the lengthy application process we contacted the health insurance company directly several times to learn what the status of our application was. At no time during the process were we assured that we would receive approval; essentially we were told that coverage would begin pending approval.

In conclusion, I offer the following recommendations for shopping for health insurance:

1. Comparison shop online. Get quotes through the online brokers to get a general idea of what your costs will be. If you have pre-existing conditions, the prices quoted will not be reflected in your quote.

2. Narrow down the list of companies quoted to three and then contact them directly. Bypass the broker as they are an unnecessary additional step in what certainly is not a quick approval process.

3. If you need insurance by a particular date, apply well in advance to allow for delays, for misplaced paperwork, changes in your application, etc. Our insurance coverage was approved effective a specific date, but we were able to move it to another date to coincide with the dropping of our NJ health care provider.

In all, the experience was wearisome at times and a real eye opener. I know you see ads all the time for online insurance quotes. I am not saying to avoid the sites, but please consider what we went through before using an online broker exclusively.