James Hunter

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Homeserve USA (aka Home Emergency Insurance Solutions, aka HEIS) June 2016

I've noticed a large peak in searches about Homeserve USA (aka Home Emergency Insurance Solutions, aka HEIS). They offer the insurance for the pipe from your water meter (your side) to the pipe connection into your home. Activity peaks generally occur when Homeserve USA does a major advertising mailing. Obviously I'm not on their mail list, so unless I see a peak, in visitors to blog postings about them, I don't know when they're actively selling the insurance..

I've done 7 postings to this blog. It all started when I got a letter from Robert (Bob) Day the SJWC Director of Customer Service. It looked like an "official letter from SJWC", so I read it carefully and realized it was actually a direct mailer marketing piece. I started to pull on the "loose ends" and researched Homeserve USA and found some less than positive accounts and information.

This insurance represents a source of non-regulated revenue to SJWC. If all 220,000 residential rate payers purchased this insurance $15.6 million in premium payments to Homeserve and as I discovered at least 10%, $1.56 million would be paid to SJWC. So, SJWC has a financial incentive to support this program "surprise". How much labor from SJWC employees used? NTP&S (Non-Tariffed Products & Services) was one of the points of "disagreement" in the current General Rate Case (A1601002), because it's hard to determine hours that we pay for get used to do work on NTP&S, so ORA (Office of Ratepayer Advocates) and came up with a compromise, but did not set a precedent.

This is the eighth posting I've done and I hope it encourages buyers, in particular ratepayers of SJWC, to read a bit, do a search on the internet and form their own opinion and make an informed decision.

So far I don't see any significant changes from, what I've documented, in my previous postings:
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