An important consideration when choosing pet insurance is if, and how much, a plan would cover you if you had to see a specialist or go to an emergency facility. Doesn’t it always happen that your pup falls and hurts himself late at night when the vet isn’t open?

This forces you to go to an emergency clinic, which typically costs a lot more. While pet insurance would more than likely cover treatment of a broken leg, how much would they cover at an emergency clinic?

Some companies will cover the same amount as if you saw your normal veterinarian, while others will lower the coverage amount. The same goes for referral specialists. Say your cat developed some kind of skin allergy and had to visit an allergist. Often specialists end up costing much more. True, this is also something that most pet insurance companies would cover, but at what cost?

Make sure that when you’re looking into insurance, that you find out if you are covered for treatments outside of your normal veterinarian.

I came across an interesting article regarding the cost of pet care. The article cites the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. According to the Journal, from 1980 to 2005, the cost of pet care his risen 124%! This number even adjusts for inflation. And in the past 10 years, veterinary costs have been growing at twice that of the consumer price index. EEEK!

That coupled with the trend to make pets more a part of our families, coupled with our ::cough:: troubled economy, and advancing veterinary technology has really sparked interest and acceptance of pet insurance.

How do veterinarians respond? Through the veterinarians that we work with and through research through the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, it appears that most veterinarians are on board. The majority of veterinarians understand that when pet owners have insurance they are able to make better decisions and follow the veterinarian’s recommended care.

Their biggest concern was the fear of pet insurance turning into a managed care system. They do not like the notion that pet insurance could replicate human health insurance, and start to dictate their fees. Well veterinarians, rest easy, pet insurance doesn’t have the intention to do so. The North American Pet Health Association, which was founded by reputable pet insurance companies in the US and Canada, has a mission that pet insurance will never dictate veterinary fees. You can learn more about NAPHIA through the website here.

If you have any comments from your own veterinarians (or are one yourself) I’d love to her their (your) thoughts!

An interesting topic came up over the past few days under my post on Why do pet insurance policies have so many limits? about breed specific exclusions.

What are they?

Very simply, a list of coverage exclusions if you enroll a given breed. Fortunately for you pet owners, there is only one company that is doing this, that I’m aware of. The list is quite exhaustive, has just about every dog breed out there with at least 2 or 3 specific exclusions next to each. AND at the top of the list says “Please refer to your policy for a full list of exclusions that apply to all breeds, including mixed breeds”. So, buyers beware: this list isn’t even complete!

Well apparently, they have a similar list for cats! The pet owner I had been chatting back and forth with mentioned that she wasn’t even aware of the exclusions, and was shocked to find that her previously healthy kittens (as in cats who are still very young, and with few health problems) had so many exclusions. I wasn’t even aware of the list myself until she brought it up, which of course made me go do some research. It is much smaller than the dog breed exclusion list, but exists none the less.

The sad part about the whole situation, is that like Sandy, many pet owners aren’t aware of such lists until it’s too late. Now, unfortunately for her, her cats now have these pre-existing conditions so if she wanted to switch providers these things wouldn’t be covered.

I still think the whole thing is crazy. You don’t hear about “breed” specific exclusions in human health care. That’d be like saying people with fair skin won’t be covered for skin cancer because they might be more prone to it!

I’ll revert back to my mantra: if it sounds crazy, it probably is!

So now I want to hear more stories about people’s experiences with breed specific exclusions. Is there anyone out there that was aware of this list before purchasing the insurance?

I wanted to touch on the topic of the differences between having pet insurance versus putting money aside or using a credit card because I’ve seen a few comments from you guys about the topic. This is usually a highly disputed topic because about three years ago consumer reports made the suggestion that a person should open a savings account as opposed to buying into pet insurance.

Ok.

While maybe three years ago this *might* have been a good idea, look at where we are today. If you had happened to invest the money you were putting aside, it’s likely disappeared into dust, if anything. Also, in the past three years multiple pet insurance players have entered the arena to not only offer more options, but raise the bar for any existing companies.

Of course I am biased on the situation, but let’s think about this logically. If you start putting, say $20 away a month tomorrow, and if you have the self-discipline to do that then GOOD FOR YOU! What happens if you’re on a hiking trip this summer, say in June, and your trusted walking companion trips, stumbles down a hill and ends up breaking a foot. Traumatic for you, of course. Traumatic on your wallet – YES! The trip to the emergency room and treatment for a broken foot ends up costing you about $1,000. Yes, you might be happy to have the $100 you had put away at this point, but would probably be MUCH happier if you had put that $20 into pet insurance and instead of having to cover $900 of the bill out of pocket, you’d only have to pay maybe $100-$200.

The same would go for a credit card. If you put that $1,000 onto a credit card a paid it off, you’d have to worry about interest accruing and it would end up costing you more than the $1,000 trip to the vet. Now, if you feel like your pet is indestructible, power to ya for saving money! Just bear in mind that accidents (expensive and inexpensive ones) can happen any time.

You can visit here to learn more about alternatives to pet insurance.

Since pet health insurance is a fairly unfamiliar concept in North America, most people don’t find out about it until it’s too late. More than likely, the pet has a large injury or serious illness costing the pet owner a couple hundred to a thousand dollars, forcing them to look into pet insurance for future incidents. As one would hopefully pick up on, you can’t buy insurance for your burning house and hope that it’s covered, just like you can’t get insurance on your injured pet and hope that it’s covered. What’s worse is that whatever incidents that have occurred in the pet’s life up to the point of insurance will most likely become pre-existing conditions, creating more exclusions in the pet’s policy.

With most pet insurance companies, they will limit the age of enrollment. The age limit is typically around 13 to 14 years old, but can be as low as 9 or 10 years old. Do you think this is fair? Do you think that it’s in your best interest? If you’re willing to pay the money, why won’t they take it?

If you were, dare I say, fortunate enough to start paying on an insurance policy when your pet was young, and needed the insurance to pay out when the pet was nearing seniority, did you get what you were expecting? What we’ve found in many cases was that many people stick with their existing company as the pet ages because they have the, sometimes misleading, notion that all of that money they have put in will pay off. When the truth of the matter is that the exclusions to each policy renewal grow with ‘pre-existing’ conditions from the policy term before. Has this happened to you? Did your poor pet, for example, get diabetes when he was 4 and you thought “way to go self, you were smart enough to get insurance when Dilbert was 2” but in the end found out that the diabetes were only covered for a year and then became ‘pre-existing’? We want to hear your stories of pet insurance with older pets, suggestions, comments, etc.