Pet Insurance and Older Pets
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.
