Pet insurance
Tried searching the forums but didn't see anything too recent.
Do you have pet insurance? If so, who is your insurer and have you been happy with the coverage, and speed of payouts?
I'm debating between Healthy Paws, specifically their 90% coverage, $100 annual deductible plan, for about $44/month and Trupanion, which would be 100% coverage + $60 deductible per claim for about $47/month.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Anna Morelli on
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Never had pet insurance. If you can afford normal Veterinary care, just pay for that and pay yourself the monthly payments you would be making for the pet insurance, creating a pet emergency fund you could draw on if and when a true emergency cropped up ( which may never happen ) When you reach your goal, you can stop paying into it and just keep it for something you cannot otherwise handle. This will also give you good incentive to keep your pet healthy in other ways. Prevention is better than cure.
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Permalink Reply by Bogart the Cardigan on
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I did lots of research on pet insurance and asked around. Decided on VPI for 25 per month. However, I haven't had any claims to file until this month, and don't know how helpful they are going to be... We shall see.
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Permalink Reply by Priss, Charlie & Kaylee (PK) on
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It's a tough decision.We chose to do a hybrid between Anna's suggestion and full coverage insurance. We chose to get Embrace for $27/month with a $500 annual deductible to cover unforeseen emergencies, like a major injury or multiple trips to the vet over the course of the year that add up. It doesn't cover routine care like vaccines or dental cleaning, but those expenses are easier to plan for.
So far we haven't needed to make a claim. So, I can't comment on their service however.
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Permalink Reply by Beth on
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If you are paying $44 a month for 12 months a year for the typical 12 year lifespan of a dog, you are paying $6336.00 over the life of the dog in insurance premiums. Of all the pets I've owned over the years, I've never had one that needed treatment that came close to $6000. Things like x-rays are generally pretty cheap for dogs (maybe a few hundred dollars; I had two x-rays done on a cat about 5 years ago and it was only about $90--- flea and tick meds cost more).
Things like MRI's can be over $1000, but remember that frequently you would not choose to undergo those sorts of treatments. When Maddie started having seizures, we could have gotten an MRI to check for a tumor, but what would we have done with the information? I'm not having brain surgery done on a dog. A blown knee is usually a few thousand, but most dogs won't blow their knees. If you plan on owning pets over your life, chances are you would spend way more on insurance than any treatments would ever cost.
IMO, you are much better off saving the money and keeping an emergency fund. For people, we insure because treatments can cost tens or hundreds of thousands. Most of us would never put our dogs through treatments that cost that much even if we could afford it, because we would not make our dogs suffer through treatments that they cannot begin to understand.
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Permalink Reply by Vicky Hay on
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This was the experience of a dear, dog-loving friend of mine. He spent a ton o' money on insurance premiums, and then when one of his dogs did need expensive surgery, the insurer found every which way from Sunday to get out of covering it.
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Permalink Reply by susan on
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I never had pet insurance before I got Jeli. My previous two dogs both had very expensive vet costs. My lab (a rescue) had hip displaysia at a young age, and I went ahead and did the TPO proceedure for her. It was at lease 5K. It worked fabulously and she was able to go on and do agility. My previous corgi was healthy as an Ox until about 10 years old and then he developed a brain tumor. It took a while to figure that out, so between the figuring it out stage and then trying to treat it, I spend about 15K. (I learned a lot of things I would do differently if faced with that situation again and please dear god don't let me face it again! ) But, because of these experiences I went ahead and purchased the pet insurance for Jeli through AKC. I just have the plan that covers injuries and illnesses for now, and as she gets older I can expand the policy - I think they have 5 levels of coverage.
So far, I have tried to file a few claims because she had recurring UTIs when she was a very young pup. They did not cover them, which I thought they would. I wasn't very happy about that, but I purchased the full year, so I have a year to make up my mind whether or not to continue.
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@ susan., you just put the finger on the problem. Do you think that the insurance would have paid the 5K or the 15K? Not likely they would foot that kind of expenses. I may be wrong....
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Permalink Reply by Andrea on
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Off topic, but my Ein has had issues with UTI's recently. We have done 2 urinalysis and a food change. Now she has zero struvite crystals and her PH is right where it should be. Our doc had us switch to a raw diet. She said that it's one of the best ways to feed your dog a nice high acidity diet with high quality ingredients. Unlike the dog food for struvite crystals that are all corn based. So we do the raw diet, cranberry supplement, yogurt or kefir, and apple cider vinegar each day and she's been wonderfully UTI free.Anyways, hope that helps.
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Honestly, pet insurance is a waste. Normal vet fees for simple things like office visits, shots, and regular perscriptions aren't that expensive. I mean, we just did 2 office visits, 2 urinalysis, 1 fecal test, and 2 rounds of antibiotics for a whole like 250$ total? Over the course of a month this isn't a lot. It's a lot less than paying the premiums for insurance. Most of which have deductibles and you'd be paying that amount anyways. I just put 50$ into a pet fund each month. When the pets need check ups, surgeries, what not we pull from there. We've never gone below 200$ in this account for all 3 pets. We even had to have surgery for one of the cats using this account and it didn't go below that amount. 50$ per month is cheaper than any pet insurance I've seen for my 3 pets. So we end up saving money.
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Permalink Reply by Audrey Shubin on
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my sister has pet insurance for her dog and it is WELL worth it for them... i can't quite remember which one they have but i know they only pay like $30/month and it is pretty good... for their dog he has had 3 surgeries and a few emergency vet visits in the past few years and he is only 5 years old... they've have surgeries for him as young as 1 year and thats when they decided to get it. Now her dog has epilepsy and her insurance covers his medication he takes daily. Every year she has met her deductible and they get their payouts within two weeks. she is very happy with them. hope this helps... i am getting a puppy on saturday and with our luck with animals we are DEFINITELY getting insurance for him... i would not risk it. we have a cat that needed hip surgery on BOTH hips at not even two years old... it was the most agonizing thing to go through deciding if we could afford his surgeries or not, we won't be going through that again...
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Insurance is a good thing if you would have difficulty fronting unexpected Vet bills. As Audrey points out, it can be agonizing to try to figure out if you can afford or not some procedure your animal needs and you want done. The right insurance product can give you much needed peace of mind while you build up an emergency fund. It's important however to be sure the insurance will cover what you cannot.
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I am glad it works for your sister. I do want to point out, though, that one of my dogs takes anti-seizure medications. The cost?
About $8.00 for a 50-day supply through the regular pharmacy (closer to $40 at the vet's office).
So that's about $60 a year for the medication, or $5 a month. When I advise people to price it out, that's what I mean. Many procedures on pets are much cheaper than on people, and many of the more expensive procedures are things we would not choose to put our pets through. I have three pets. If I was paying $30 per month per pet for insurance, that would be $1080 per year on pet insurance. That's a lot of money out of pocket, and in about three years if you saved it you'd have enough for one major orthopedic surgery.
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