Is Pet Insurance worth the investment?

[LynneSin]

I've read enough posts here about how folks have paid thousands of dollars for their sick pets to get the better again. Before I owned a cat I thought - No way I'd pay that much on an animal. Now with Abbie, I'm kinda torn.

It's not that I couldn't come up with a couple of thousand dollars if I needed it, but I just can't see spending that much on a pet. Then when I was at PetSmart last night I heard them advertise about Pet Insurance. I looked it up online and saw that for about $10/month I could get pet insurance on my cat.

So my question is this: Is Pet Insurance worth it? I don't mind paying money each year to have yearly checkup and shots, but if the vet came back to me and said my cat needed expensive surgery or treatment I'm not sure what I would do. But if I spent money on Pet Insurance, then it's a small price to pay to ensure I would never have to make those kinds of decisions.

What do you folks think and if you have Pet Insurance - who do you recommend.

[trof]

1. I think dogs are more susceptible

to needing expensive treatment. Just my opinion, based on personal experience.

[WillParkinson]

2. Our vet...

Suggested it.

I read from one vet that it breaks her heart when someone tells her they can't afford to have the procedure done and the pet ends up being put down.

[YNGW]

3. I Have A Question

>I was at PetSmart last night ....

I know they spell it "PetSmart", but 2 questions:

1) Is it pronounced "Pets Mart" or "Pet Smart"?

and

2) How can you tell?

[Booberdawg]

4. I have it on my dog

http://www.petinsurance.com

Here's a link for the insurance I have on Boober. I don't have it on my cats though. They do exempt pre-existing conditions but since you found the cat they may require a physical instead.

I just felt I couldn't afford an expensive illness or injury with Boober and I would be especially heartbroken with him if something happened and I had to put him to sleep because I couldn't afford to pay for it. He was my son's dog. So I got the insurance for him.

[cjbuchanan]

Not worth it unless...

My experience with it has not been worth it. Most of them do not cover accidents or much in the realm of ER expenses (including the surgery of which you speak). My wife and I have spent a lot of time looking at this because over the last 2 years we've spent several thousand dollars on one of our pets. The amount refunded $18.

The only way that it does seem to be worth it is for medications. If your pet is going to need constant meds, you might want to look into it. If not, it doesn't seem worth $10 a month.

[mopinko]

5. don't think it is worth it

the coverage generally is not very extensive. they only cover about half the cost of most of those big ticket things, and have lots of holes in the coverage. you are better off putting some money aside for vet bills, and if you don't need it, you can throw your cat one heck of a funeral when they die.

[Plaid Adder]

6. Well, I can tell you our pet health care story, and let you be the judge..

When your cats are healthy, paying their bills is not a strain. The shots are kind of expensive but it's only once a year, and spaying and neutering are of course one-time expenses.

Where you are going to run into trouble is if the cat is a) hit by a car; b) in a really bad fight; or c) gets feline leukemia, toxoplasmosis, or some other disease that requires a lot of 'hospital time' (boarding at the vet's while they take care of her).

If you can stand to do it, probably the best cat 'health insurance' policy is to make her an indoor cat. That cuts down on her exposure to diseases, motor vehicles, wild animals, and so forth. However, that won't necessarily save her, as we unfortunately know.

A long time ago, our cat Theenie stopped eating. We took her to the vet's, where they determined that she had hepatic lipidosis. This is something that happens to cats when they don't eat, and it is a serious danger for them that we hadn't known about: if they go without eating even for a couple of days, they start 'feeding' off the fat in their liver, and of course that will eventually kill them. The problem with hepatic lipidosis is that after it sets in, the cat won't eat again because it makes her throw up; she just keeps consuming her own liver until she dies.

So basically without treatment your cat will starve to death once it develops HL. The only treatment for HL, at least when it happened to our cat, is to feed the cat through a tube while restricting her motion so that she stops consuming her own liver and gets used to food again and will eventually eat on her own. However, it usually takes several weeks of more or less constant treatment to get her over this, and there's where the big bucks came in.

We found out eventually that what caused all of this was that Theenie had eaten a piece of ribbon from a balloon we had around the house and it had gotten wadded up in her digestive system somehwere so that food couldn't get through. After a while at the vet's she barfed it up and we thought after that she would improve; and for a while she did. But after we took her home, thinking she was better, she took a turn for the worse, and we ended up having to euthanize her anyway, after having blown between $1000 and $2000 on her care.

From my POV, the lessons of the story were these:

1) Watch your cats closely for signs of strange behavior. Cats are evolved to conceal illness and will not show obvious symptoms of being ill until things have advanced to a pretty desperate stage. If we had noticed her eating less earlier we might have been able to save her.

2) Don't let them eat stuff that's not food and don't leave tempting stuff that's not food around where they can get to it.

3) Animals are extremely demoralized by long illnesses/treatment in a way that humans are not because they don't understand it and you can't explain it to them. It was very striking with Theenie. She was all right while she was at the vet's, and we figured she would make it; but once she got home, she just lost the will to go on, and I think it was because while she was at the vet's she was basically figuring, "OK, as long as I'm in this weird alien environment clearly I have to be probed, but once my owners rescue me I'll be OK," and once she found out that she would have to keep going with the tube feedings even after she got home she had just had it. We feel like she basically told us that she was done and it was time to let her go.

So, IMHO,

4) Most forms of treatment that will involve several thousand dollars, unless it's some kind of surgery that you can do once and then heal from, is probably not worth it from the cat's point of view.

For instance, based on this experience, I would never treat a cat for cancer. Our other cat died of cancer--again, we didn't know he had it until the autopsy because he concealed the symptoms until very late--and we are both glad that he was able to run around and lead his normal life right up to a day or two before he died, instead of having to go through chemo, radiation, etc. Diabetes, on the other hand, well, if you don't mind giving the shots, I don't think the cats mind it too much.

So I guess the upshot is that the insurance might be a good idea if your cat is an outdoor cat and liable to get injured, but otherwise I would be inclined to just take your chances and hope nothing happens to her like what happened to Theenie. I think if we had it to do over again, knowing what we do now, we would just have euthanized her right away. As much as we love them, animals are different from humans, and I think at some point you have to ask yourself whether you're putting them through the treatment for their sake or for yours.

Good luck,

The Plaid Adder

[sinkingfeeling]

7. Don't have it and have asked that question ......

One of my dogs is very 'messed' up...strange hormone problems, hair that won't grow, weight problems, etc. After years of testing and medicines, they now think she can't convert the thyroid enzyme T4 to T3, which is what cells use. She now takes T3 (cytomel) which is only available for 'humans' in the USA. I started with getting 30 tablets at Wal-Mart for $27.90 ...she was taking 4 tablets a day!! I now get the same stuff from Canada for $73.00 for 600 tablets!! Yes, that's 20 times the tablets for less than 3 times the cost!!

[haele]

8. Regarding PetSmart/Banfield insurance

The pet insurance you get at PetSmart is specific to the Banfield pet hospital chain, not to any others (such as VHA or your local vet). It is portable between most Banfields for the most part, so it can be fairly convienient if you live near a PetSmart or an individual Banfield Vet clinic.

The positives are that you pay around $240 a year ($20 a month) for a full shot schedule, up to, in my experiance, four free yearly vet visits that include specified procedures (such as specific blood tests, urine and stool tests and a fairly comprehensive check-up)and an average of 20% off most procedures (especially spay and nueters), which includes x-rays, minor surgery, and overnight boarding. Most have a decent schedule regular hours, including the weekend.

The downside is that you are usually "assigned" to a specific Banfield, the facilities are usually only a fairly basic clinic, they usually have to refer critical or major surgery cases out, they don't always have overnight vet or vet tech monitoring, and you are at the mercy of the quality of the vets and vet-techs that are hired to the local facilities.
And they don't do emergancies very well - if your dog or cat has a seizure after hours or is in an accident, you will still have to take him or her to an emergancy vet hospital and pay full price, or hope to wait it out until the Banfield facility opens up in the morning to get the poor Boo stablized. And even then, that's about all they'll be able to do, stablize a critical emergancy until you can get the critter to a place that has specified MRI, neurology, cardiac, or physical therapy facilities.

Banfield is basically an HMO for regular pets. If you aren't a breeder, or have an unusual pet or one with unusual chronic issues, it is probably pretty decent service.

The best thing to do is to check out the facilities and the vets they hire in your area and see which ones strike your fancy. Especially ask the vets what sort of animals they specialized in; if you have rodents, birds, or reptiles, the Banfield you are interested in may not have a vet that actually studied those particular pets, and you'll find yourself taking your babies to another vet or facility at full price to cover any medical procedure the Banfield vet may not feel comfortable with because s/he had only studied the standard dog n' cat vet practices.

I can tell you, we've been lucky there is an over-abundance of good vets in the San Diego area, many good vets will sign on to places like Banfield just so they can have a regular paycheck and benefits instead of working on their own "part time" as part of another vet practice, clinic or hospital. Our Banfield vet is very good, very professional and very flexible with what our plan dictates and what he practices - as when our cat had a one month bout of right side ataxia, he was able to pretty much save us a good $400 in extra tests with the free exam, discounted x-rays, and complete write-up he did for us prior to refering us VHA kitty neurologist to find out what was making Moggy stumble about like a drunken sailor. He's also doing an extra gluacoma test on our dog today as part of "a normal visit procedure", so we'll only have to shell out about $6 this visit instead of around $100 for a regular vet visit and the whole eye test routine. He didn't "have to" do most of this, but he did, instead of referring us to a different vet or charging us for "extra" procedures.

However from what I've heard, that's not always the case with a Banfield vet.

As for comparing PetSmart/Banfield pet insurance with others - most other pet insurance I've seen is more like a savings account rather than a service. Unless you have a clinic or vet hospital that carries its own insurance service policy, it's probably the best out there for the regular shots/exam routine.

Good luck, and please, research the facility before you sign up with them.

Haele

[Snow]

9. I dunno -

we've had cats for years & never had or needed insurance. I also owned a horse for a while, and probably should've had insurance on him - he developed some feet problems, the vet took x-rays to see what was going on, kept him at his stable (the hospital) for a coupla weeks to fix him up. The whole thing ran me several hundred (hospital 'room' was $10/day, with hay) but the vet was fine with me paying off a hundred a month. To my way of thinking, vet fees are very reasonable - just like physician fees were before we had all the third-party payers getting in there.

[geniph]

10. I've had insurance on my cats for a couple of years,

however, the one really expensive problem that one had was deemed to be "genetic" (although I still maintain it was the result of an injury) and they wouldn't reimburse for it. The coverage does include most illnesses, so if one developed diabetes or cancer (both can be very expensive to treat), it would help a lot.

The trouble is, the coverage limits are generally not that high, so you quickly hit the limit. I think, if you have the discipline to do so, you're better off putting $10 per pet per month aside in a special bank account and paying for any veterinary emergencies yourself out of that fund. However, who really has that discipline?

I'm torn on it. It needs to improve, certainly, but one of the reasons I still have it is that my pets are my children. I don't want to make decisions as to their life or death based on finances. I can make more money - I can't make more copies of my furbabies. They're unique creatures who deserve as good a quality of life as I can possibly give them. I never again want to have to put a pet who's not terminal down because I can't afford the treatment.

[amazona]

11. to be honest

In my experience it prolongs suffering because people to get treatments that they would not otherwise get -- treatments unlikely to work in the first place anyway. It seems like more reasonable treatments -- a broken leg as opposed to multiple broken bones, for example -- you can negotiate with the vet. At least around here anyway. It's the ridiculous treatments that cost thousands that turn out not to be worth it. But others may have different experiences.