The decline in workers compensation claims frequency that began during the 1990s is widespread and continued into 2006, NCCI Holdings Inc. reported Monday in an annual study.

Indemnity costs and medical severities are still rising, however, although their rate of increase has tapered off, the Boca Raton-based National Council on Compensation Insurance said in its Summer 2007 research brief. The annual increase in average indemnity costs per claim, for example, rose 9.9% from 1997 to 2001. But the rate of increase has declined to 3.5% since then, including a 5.5% drop for 2006.

ALBANY, N.Y.-New York has adopted legislation that provides new rights to health care consumers and providers in dealing with health insurance companies.

The law, signed by Gov. Eliot Spitzer on Wednesday, limits a health plan's ability to deny care that it had already preauthorized. It also gives consumers the ability to appeal to an independent reviewer when a health plan denies a request to see an out-of-network specialist for a service not available in-network.

In the last few months, the search engine business has experienced its own version of cutthroat competition: a privacy policy war, with Google, Ask.com and Microsoft vying to outdo one another in protecting their users' personal information.

But it's been difficult to make direct comparisons, in part because privacy policies tend to be written by lawyers for lawyers. So CNET News.com did some of the work for you by surveying the five leading search companies.

LOS ANGELES, CA -- The California Earthquake Authority (CEA) has come up with a compromise proposal to increase earthquake insurance premiums for consumers and reduce the amount of money that insurers must make available to pay claims, reported the Los Angeles Times this week.

According to the Times, the plan calls for policyholders to pay eight percent more for coverage and for insurance companies to make $1.2 billion available, about $1 billion less than they do now. The restructuring proposal was spurred by the upcoming expiration, on Dec. 1, 2008, of a law that requires insurers to provide $2.2 billion to help cover claims from a moderate earthquake for the first 12 years of the CEA's existence.