The only threads on this that search brings up for me are 13 years old or more so I thought I’d ask for updated opinions.
We have a cat adopted from a shelter; he’ll be 4 in October. He was neutered by the shelter at 3 months, had a series of shots in his 1st year and had a 3 year rabies shot when he was 2. He’s had no health issues so far. However we were talking with a friend whose dogs are always getting sick and running up big bills. So we were wondering about maybe looking into pet health insurance just in case?
We looked at a number of websites but can’t really figure out from them what’s covered or not?
This site seemed to have a good overview of what wasn’t covered, which seemed to be most things I think of as vet expenses. What is described as covered is unexpected, unpredictable costs. When you read the fine print it sounds like not much is covered, like the exam fee for a visit. The few times I looked into it I decided I would be better off putting the amount of premiums in a savings account and drawing on that if needed.
At first it looks like it has a paywall but that can be clicked past. I trust Consumer Reports because they don’t take any money from any industry they research or report on.
We don’t have a pet. But our neighbor has a 12-year-old dog we look after a lot. She has pet insurance for the dog and seems to be happy with it, but I don’t know the particulars.
Posting mostly to subscribe to the thread. I have an eleven year old dog, and I worry about health expenses in the near future. When we first got him, I looked into insurance, but none of them covered more than 50% of catastrophic expenses, so I decided to pass. Now that problems seem more likely to occur, I’m very interested in what sort of options there are.
Haven’t had a pet in years, but in the mid-2000s shared one with my now-ex. The problem with pet insurance at that time was that any ailment your pet came down with in (let’s say) 2006 was automatically a “pre existing condition” and not covered in 2007. That made it kind of useless as far as we were concerned. It may or may not still be that way, but this is one of the things to check the fine print for.
I have had a policy with Healthy Paws since Feb of this year on a 2 yr old mixed Jack Russell. Annual premium about $210 and it covers all but routine care with a $250 annual deductible and no limit on coverage. The policy pays 80% of a covered loss and thus far, I have had no reason to submit a claim.
My two prior Beagles had cancer along with other non-routine medical issues and I estimate I spent $12K -$14K in total for this care on both dogs and all was out of pocket as I had no insurance. If a similar policy had been in force, I believe about 80% of the above would have been covered because my background is insurance/policy interpretation and this current policy is clear with little, if any, ambiguity.
If I never have a need to submit a claim, I’ll have no regret because not submitting claims means I will not have to deal with medical treatment and recovery which can be inconvenient and mentally challenging, at least for me.
Should you get a policy? I have no idea. Much depends upon your financial situation and whether the annual premium is worth whatever peace of mind it may justify but my experience brought me to purchasing insurance this time around and the policy with Healthy Paws seems like a good choice.
I’m a little confused - of course, any condition your pet had in 2006 would be a pre-existing condition if you got/changed insurance in 2007. Do you mean that you had coverage in 2006 from Insurance A , your pet was treated for cancer in 2006 and therefore Insurance A ( which you still had in 2007) wouldn’t cover treatment for that cancer in 2007?
Yes, this, exactly. In other words not like the phrase is used for human-being insurance, where you’re only subject to “pre-existing condition” bs if you let your insurance lapse and then decided to go get insurance (again). With the pet insurance packages we looked at, anything your pet could ever develop as a medical problem would only be covered by the insurance during the year in which it first appeared. Starting second year, they stick you with the whole bill and don’t cover any of it.
My cat Mikko is covered by Healthy Paws. I haven’t had to use it yet, but considering the more than $5000 spent in less than 4 years on my previous cat, Sydney Hellcat, it gives me peace of mind. (Sydney was an ill, elderly cat abandoned by her family. I’d take her again, even knowing the money spent on her.) This is the first time I’ve had pet insurance.
I would say it’s probably not worth it from a financial standpoint. I’ve had at 2-3 dogs at a time for decades and I would bet the premiums would be more than I’ve spent in vet bills. But it can give you a nice peace of mind if your pet were to have a costly health issue. The other variable to consider is how far you will go when your pet gets a potentially terminal illness. Some people will try anything to prolong their pet’s life, while other people take a more pragmatic approach. If you’re the type who will try everything, then it’s going to be more likely that you’ll rack up some high vet bills and get more use from the insurance.
Healthy Paws insurance has been mentioned positively several times in this thread. In my 2nd post (#3), the Consumer Reports site included reflects well on Healthy Paws. Try reading that CR article and perhaps investigate the cost of Healthy Paws since two different sorts of sources have been positive about it, if that narrows down your search work. Checking with your vet’s experience with a particular plan would be the next step I would do after finding out the costs through an interest search.
I did extensive research 2 years ago for my daughter’s dog. The 2 companies with the best plans ($ and coverage) I came up with were Healthy Paws and Trupanion. They also had the most favorable ratings from a couple consumer ratings groups. At the time, many companies had age restrictions on the pet, so be sure to check that.
Remember that insurance is never a way to save money. It’s purely for risk management. If you could afford your dog’s treatments if it gets sick, do not buy insurance.
I have had five dogs and three cats. Only one of them cost us more than $1000 in unexpected medical bills. A friend had a Toller with constant health issues due to birth defects, and the dog cost him over $10,000 in vet bills. So it can happen.
But if you are paying $250 per year, and your dog lives 15 years, that’s about $4,000 in premiums. I don’t think it’s that common for a pet to cost $4,000 in vet bills if you exclude regular checkups and routine medicine. In fact, I know that’s the case, or the insurance company would charge more. They’re in it for profit.
If it was me and I was worried about paying unexpected vet bills, I’d set up a ‘pet’ account and set up an auto-transfer of $25/mo. You won’t miss it, and if your pet makes it to the end of life without major health problems along the way, you can use the money to buy a new dog, or leave it in there with the next dog and keep adding to it. Eventually, unless you are unlucky you might have a nice little nest egg to add to your retirement after your last pet.
I am wishing I had pet insurance now. In another thread I mentioned that our boxer/French Mastiff has a torn CCL. I’ve been putting off surgery because it’s going to cost close to $5000. But it is now inevitable and I’m starting the process today. The surgery will be done sometime in September. Because of his size, the standard repair would have an iffy outcome so he has to have the more expensive surgery. No one in town does this type of surgery, so an orthopedic vet comes to our area from the Twin Cities a couple times a month and does multiple CCL repairs, hence the $5000 price tag. My options are let him limp around for the rest of his life (he’s 7 yo), do the surgery, or euthanize him. All crappy options. He’s a healthy dog otherwise, so there is no way we would euthanize him. He gets around ok but some days I can tell he’s hurting. So surgery it is. I received an offer for a 0% interest for 18 months credit card a couple of weeks ago. So that’s how I’ll finance it. $300 a month is doable.
I haven’t done any research on pet insurance so I’m not sure it would have covered this anyway. You can bet I’ll be looking into it when we get another dog after these two are gone.
We had a German Shepherd and had pet insurance but we rarely used it. Almost all of our potential claims fell below the deductible, so we couldn’t claim. Our neighbours had a standard poodle and used insurance quite a bit.
My neighbours experience was similar to what @AHunter3 touches on, once you make a claim on anything it was considered a “pre-existing condition” and they wouldn’t cover you again for that. In the end, their dogs “stomach flipped” and they had a $12,000 emergency surgery done to try to rectify it (it didn’t). When they submitted the bill to the insurance company it was rejected because a few years earlier they’d made a claim on some other sort of stomach problem.
FWIW, based on our experiences my advice would be the same as @Sam_Stone : put $25 or $50 into a savings account every month and draw down from that if you need to. In fact I remember discussing my neighbours poodle experience and they regretted getting pet insurance and explicitly said they should have banked the money. If I’d done $50/month I’d have put about $7000 in the bank during my dog’s lifespan.
If you are leaning toward insurance I’d suggest:
do some health research on your breed. Most breeds are pretty predictable. That’ll give you an idea of what you may be in for.
Research the insurance companies to see if they cover those breed related health issues and what the fine print is around them, especially related to denying or limiting claims. For example. mine varied coverage % based on the specific issue. Since Shepherds are prone to hip problems, anything hip rated was only covered at max 50%. Also, make sure you factor the $250 deductible into any cost benefit calculations.