What is Pet Insurance?

It’s no secret that American’s love their pets.  The level of affection can be tested though when a pet dog or cat is severely injured or is diagnosed with a serious illness.  It used to be rare, when confronted with expensive pet health decisions, that pet owners would choose an operation or procedure over euthanasia.  Now, with the advent of Pet Health Insurance, more people are making the decision to pay for costly pet health care.  Having insurance to accommodate the health care needs of a family pet is at least part of the reason why fewer pets need to be euthanized…

Pet Insurance acts much the same way as human health insurance.  The coverage provided takes care of a pet’s unexpected medical expenses.  Examples might be accidental injuries, illnesses, and other emergencies.  Diagnostic tests, surgeries, and other treatments may well be covered also.  It’s possible to purchase additional coverage to cover preventive/wellness care too. 

Also like human health insurance (especially human individual health insurance), Pet Insurance excludes pre-existing conditions.  There are usually other exclusions which make it even more limited than human health care coverage.  Dogs and cats, for example, are known to perpetuate some bad genetic traits that manifest themselves in serious ways as the animal grows older.  (Several dog breeds pass on a gene for Degenerative Myelopathy—many cat breeds pass on Cardiomyopathy… both of these conditions are usually excluded in a pet insurance plan.)

Pet insurance is usually quite inexpensive and can be worth it if you can’t bear the thought of having to decide between putting your pet to sleep or paying for an expensive operation after it’s hit by a car.  For some it’s more than that.  Perhaps the family pet means so much to certain family members—the children for instance—that maybe purchasing pet health insurance can be thought of as protection against profound sadness if a pet’s life is in danger merely because the cost of resolving an illness or injury is cost prohibitive.