Nursing Service Organization (NSO) Review

Thang Truong
Thang Truong
Updated on:

NSO stands for Nursing Service Organization. They’ve been around since 1976 and provide professional liability insurance to over 500,000 nurses worldwide. Policies are underwritten by CNA, a much bigger insurance company that focuses on business insurance for manufacturing, construction, manufacturing, technology, financial institutions and healthcare. You may also find information referring to Affinity Insurance Services or American Casualty Company. All of these are subsidiaries of CNA. 

Pros and Cons of Nursing Service Organization (NSO)

ProsCons
– Extremely easy online quoting
– Good customer reviews
– Affordable coverage
– Student discounts
– Coverage is only available to nurses
– Coverage is limited to $1 million per incident/$6 million annual aggregate

>>MORE: The 5 Best Malpractice Insurance Companies for Nurse Practitioners

Products Offered by Nursing Service Organization (NSO)

NSO offers malpractice insurance (also known as professional liability insurance) to nurses and student nurses. They also offer:

  • Life insurance
  • Health and dental insurance
  • Disability income insurance
  • Real estate benefits

Malpractice insurance features:

  • Liability coverage: up to $1 million dollars per claim
  • Sexual misconduct: up to $25,000
  • Defense attorney provided
  • 24/7 coverage
  • Coverage wherever you go, wherever you practice
  • License protection: up to $25,000
  • Medical payments: up to $25,000 per person or $100,000 annual aggregate
  • Assault coverage: up to $25,000
  • First aid expenses: up to $10,000
  • Deposition Representation: up to $10,000 annual aggregate

For a Registered Nurse living in Maine, we got this quote (this is for occurrence based insurance, which is more thorough than claims-made insurance)

Timeline

Description automatically generated

Life insurance: NSO also offers some group term life insurance, which is available with no medical exam. It’s underwritten by New York Life. 

For Level term insurance (not available in every state), you choose the state you live in, your age, and whether or not you smoke, and it gives you options. For a 34-year old non-smoking nurse living in Alabama, you have these choices:

  • $5.42 per month, $50,000 death benefit, 10 year term
  • $10.83 per month, $100,000 benefit, 10 year term
  • $16.25 per month, $150,000 death benefit, 10 year term
  • $21.67 per month, $200,000 death benefit, 10 year term
  • $6.58 per month, $50,000 death benefit, 20 year term
  • $13.17 per month, $100,000 death benefit, 20 year term
  • $19.75 per month, $150,000 death benefit, 20 year term
  • $26.33 per month, $200,000 death benefit, 20 year term

For Group term insurance you can choose your monthly premium, anywhere from $3.00 a month to $30.00 a month. You select your premium and the online quote tells you how much term life insurance this will buy you. We selected $18.00 a month and were told $300,000 worth of group term life insurance could be had for that price. 

They also can refer you to Liberty Mutual if you want home and auto insurance, supposedly with a 12% discount, thanks to NSO. 

If you’re wondering what this “real estate benefit” is, so were we. NSO pairs with a group of real estate agents, and in exchange for choosing an agent in their network, you get a rebate. There’s only one complaint about this on the BBB website, and it seems to be from someone who does not understand how income taxes work. There’s not a lot of information about this online, and we’ve never seen another insurance company offer anything like it, but it sounds good.

>>MORE: The 5 Best Malpractice Insurance Companies for Nursing Students

Financial Strength Rating of Nursing Service Organization (NSO)

NSO’s parent company, CNA earns an A, or excellent rating for financial strength from A.M. Best. You want your insurance company to have the resources available to pay claims, and it seems that NSO has those resources. 

Customer Satisfaction Rating of Nursing Service Organization (NSO)

NSO does not appear on any of J.D. Power’s insurance rankings. They don’t appear on the BBB’s website, either, but their parent company, Affinity Insurance Services does. There are 24 complaints in the last three years, and four reviews, three one-star reviews and one four-star reviews. On a website called Resellerratings, NSO got a 4.75 score (out of five). Many people praise how fast and easy the process was, and they have over 10,000 reviews singing their praises. 

>>MORE: The Best 4 Providers of Nursing Malpractice Insurance

Consumer Complaints Rating of Nursing Service Organization (NSO)

You can find the complaint index for NSO under the American Casualty Company. The median average index across all companies on the NAIC website is 1.0. American Casualty Company gets a ratio of .22 which means they have much fewer complaints than you would expect.

Digital Experience Rating of Nursing Service Organization (NSO)

It is extremely easy to get a quote for malpractice insurance from NSO. All you have to do is select your state, whether you a professional or a student nurse, what your major field of study is, and whether you are employed full-time, part-time, or self-employed and you get a quote in less than a minute. 

There’s also a comprehensive list of frequently asked questions—44 of them. They address some of the many questions nurses may have, and if your particular question isn’t listed,  there’s a phone number you can call. 

The website is very informative for nurses, and there are hundreds of articles on the website that you can reference—about Covid 19, how health care is changing, etc. You can even earn continuous education (CE) credit through the NSO learning center. 

Getting a quote for term life insurance is also easy—getting a quote for dental or health insurance is more complicated, but we would expect that. 

>>MORE: Top 4 Providers of Malpractice Insurance for Psychologists and Counselors

Last Thoughts

If you’re a nurse and you’re looking for professional liability insurance, NSO is a great choice. They have a very easy online quoting system, good reviews from nurses, and an easy-to-use website. Shop around, but a quote from NSO is worth your time.

Thang Truong
Thang Truong

Thang Truong covers small business insurance and small business success at BravoPolicy. He is a licensed P&C insurance agent. Previously, he held product leadership positions at realtor.com, Capital One, NerdWallet, and Mulberry Technology. He holds a MBA degree from UC Berkeley - Haas School of Business.

More Stories

6 Best Malpractice Insurance for Nurse Practitioners for 2023

Nurse practitioners have a great deal of responsibility when it comes to patient care. Many nurse practitioners assume that because they work under a doctor and their employer provides some level of malpractice insurance, they’re covered. It may be worth it to purchase your own policy, however. Employer malpractice insurance is to protect the employer, […]

Thang Truong
Thang Truong

6 Best Malpractice Insurance Companies for Nursing Students

You’re looking forward to graduation. You’re doing your clinical rotation in some different departments, and you’re glad you’ve chosen nursing. If you’re only a student, why do you need malpractice insurance? You don’t even have your own patients yet! Sadly, as society gets more and more litigious, nursing students may find themselves held accountable for […]

Thang Truong
Thang Truong

6 Best Malpractice Insurance for Physician Assistants for 2023

You’ve worked hard to graduate and become a Physician’s Assistant. Naturally, you’ll want to protect yourself from mistakes and malpractice claims, which seem to multiply every year. What companies are worth getting a quote from? Who are the best providers of malpractice insurance?  The 6 Best Providers of Malpractice Insurance for Physician Assistants We gathered […]

Thang Truong
Thang Truong

7 Best Malpractice Insurance for Physical Therapists in 2023

Physical therapists are responsible for helping injured or ill people recover their mobility and ease their pain. It’s a lot of responsibility, especially with your hands on the patients some of the time. Accidents can happen, and sometimes physical therapists can get sued. Should you carry your own malpractice insurance? With the average cost of […]

Thang Truong
Thang Truong

6 Best Social Work Malpractice Insurance Companies for 2023

Social work isn’t one of those professions most people associate with lawsuits. After all, social workers are there to help people, so it seems unlikely on the surface that they’d be sued. However, malpractice lawsuits can happen to social workers, too. So below we’ll look at the scenarios where social work malpractice insurance comes into […]

Thang Truong
Thang Truong

6 Best Legal Malpractice Insurance Companies for 2023

It seems counterintuitive that lawyers would need to source their own malpractice insurance.  After all, do the people filing the malpractice suits really get sued themselves? Lawyers themselves can actually be sued for a number of reasons: claims of negligence, breach of confidentiality, administrative errors, missing filing deadlines, and professional misconduct. And as any lawyer […]

Thang Truong
Thang Truong

6 Best Providers for Cheap Chiropractic Malpractice Insurance in 2023

According to the American Chiropractic Association, more than 35 million people visit chiropractors every year. These people come from all walks of life and all age groups for treatment of neuromuscular disorders, primarily through adjustments. While chiropractors are highly trained and careful in their application of therapeutic treatments, there can still be accidents and injuries […]

Thang Truong
Thang Truong

Top 10 Malpractice Insurance Companies for 2023

You have many options when it comes to finding malpractice insurance. A type of professional liability insurance, most major small business insurers offer some sort of malpractice insurance coverage. To help you find the best options, we’ve outlined the 10 best malpractice insurance companies below. 1) Proliability: Best for buying process  Proliability has been in […]

Thang Truong
Thang Truong

Malpractice Insurance Costs by Specialty (2023 Rates)

Malpractice insurance is a type of professional liability insurance. Malpractice insurance most often applies to healthcare workers and lawyers. This type of insurance protects you if you are sued to have made any mistakes that harm a client or a patient.  Different professions might cause different types of risks in their work, therefore malpractice insurance […]

Thang Truong
Thang Truong

Top 5 Professional Liability Insurance for Federal Employees

The Federal government is the nation’s largest employer. Federal employees include anyone from law enforcement to working for the forest service. Federal Employees have the same risk of being accused of misconduct or mistakes as their peers in the private sector do.  There is a special kind of professional liability insurance, or sometimes called malpractice […]

Thang Truong
Thang Truong