As West Virginia's workers' compensation insurance market opens fully to competition July 1, policyholders should bear in mind a few basic principles when comparing your BrickStreet premium to quotes from other private carriers.

Your current BrickStreet policy may be based on loss costs established by the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) effective July 1, 2007. When comparing quotes, it's important to make sure both sets of numbers use new NCCI loss costs for July 1, 2008 and forward.

If NCCI reduced loss costs for your employer classification, you could benefit from a rate reduction by BrickStreet as well as its competitors. In other words, all carriers (including BrickStreet) will be using the same loss cost rates in pricing policies beginning July 1.

Differences in pricing occur when carriers apply other variables such as premium discounts, schedule rating and loss cost multipliers (the approved expense and profit factor) to the policy. The surest way to make an apples-to-apples comparison based on cost alone is to examine the price of your coverage per $100 of payroll.

BrickStreet is confident that when you consider our price, product and service, BrickStreet is the best value in workers' compensation insurance.