Excellent at what it prices for. The trouble starts when your practice outgrows the policy.

The $1M abuse and molestation requirement

Sexual misconduct on the individual CPH form is defense costs only. A school district, hospital system or franchise contract demanding a $1,000,000 sexual abuse and molestation liability limit is asking for indemnity — a different thing — and no endorsement on the individual program adds it. On a CPH entity policy the coverage does exist, and it stops at $1,000,000 per occurrence and $1,000,000 in the aggregate. Read the aggregate, because that is the number that fails first: a district asking $1M per occurrence and $2M aggregate is already beyond it, and California districts increasingly ask $3,000,000 and $6,000,000 — Azusa Unified and Lawndale Elementary both do for work with children.

Without it — The requirement bounces, the contract stalls, and the fix is a separate placement: a stand-alone SAM policy typically runs $3,000 to $5,000, and a package rebuilt around the requirement is often the better spend at that point. An umbrella is not a reliable shortcut either — a number of excess policies specifically exclude abuse and molestation, so the certificate gets bigger while the real protection does not move.

The LLC that the policy does not know about

An individual professional liability policy answers for the named practitioner. If you have formed an LLC or PLLC, bill through it, or have anyone working under it, the entity itself — the thing that signs leases and contracts and gets sued by name — is not the insured on an individual policy.

Without it — A claim names the company, the policy responds for the person, and the gap between them is discovered at the worst possible moment. We meet CPH insureds with LLCs regularly; most have never been asked the question.

Group practice and entity coverage

The moment there are employees, contractors, or an entity with revenue, the buying unit is the practice, not the practitioner — general liability, professional liability for the entity and everyone under it, and the abuse and molestation limit contracts ask about.

Without it — A stack of individual policies covers each person and leaves the practice itself bare — and costs more than one entity policy sooner than most owners expect.

What we happily leave alone

A true solo — no entity, no staff, no vendor contracts — holding a CPH policy at a few hundred dollars a year. That is the buyer the program was built for and the price reflects a very large, well-run pool.

Without it — Moving that person costs them money for no coverage they need. We say so and leave them where they are.

Is CPH a good insurance company?

For the buyer it was designed for, yes — and strictly speaking CPH is not the insurance company. CPH & Associates is a program administrator: they run the program, and the policy is underwritten by Philadelphia Indemnity, an A++ rated carrier. For a solo counselor, therapist or social worker with no entity and no special contract requirements, the price and the licensing-board defense coverage are genuinely hard to beat, and we tell people to keep it more often than not.

Does CPH cover sexual abuse and molestation claims?

As defense costs only, per their own published materials — the policy helps pay to defend an allegation, but it does not carry a sexual abuse and molestation liability limit. That distinction is invisible until a contract makes it visible: when a school district or facility requires "$1M sexual abuse/molestation liability," they mean an indemnity limit, and a defense-only sublimit does not satisfy it. The requirement-holder decides what counts, and in our experience they read the certificate carefully on exactly this line.

How the stand-alone SAM placement works

I formed an LLC. Does my CPH policy cover it?

If what you hold is an individual practitioner policy — the common one — then the insured is you, not the company. The LLC that bills clients, signs the office lease and appears on contracts is a separate legal person, and a lawsuit that names it is not automatically answered by a policy that names you. CPH does sell business policies, so the fix may be as simple as moving to the right product with them; or, if a contract is also demanding abuse and molestation limits, it may be the moment to rebuild the whole program around the entity. Either way: if you have an LLC and an individual policy, send us the declarations page and we will tell you plainly which situation you are in.

The individual-or-entity question, worked through

My contract requires $1M SAM and CPH says they cannot add it. What now?

Our recommendation, most of the time: write the entire program rather than bolting on the one coverage. A stand-alone sexual abuse and molestation policy runs $3,000 to $5,000 a year in the surplus lines market, and a package — general liability, professional liability and the SAM limit together — is usually cheaper than that stand-alone policy alone, while covering the whole practice. Keeping CPH and adding the monoline SAM beside it works too, and we quote both so you see both numbers rather than take our word. What does not work is searching for a cheap SAM endorsement, because for this program it does not exist.

Why does everyone from CPH seem to find you the same way?

Because the gap is structural, not personal. The program covers a very large number of practitioners on one form, and that form treats sexual misconduct as defense-only for sound actuarial reasons. Every year some fraction of those practitioners signs a contract that demands the limit the form cannot give — school districts and health systems have standardized on the requirement — and they all go looking with the same words. We wrote down what we tell each of them, and this page is it.