“You can judge a man’s true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.”
The quote by Paul McCartney is still relevant. A man who treats animals right treats his fellow human beings right too. People who are cruel to animals are cruel to others, and people, who love the vicinity of animals (not wild animals), play with them, give them food and shelter have a heart as big as a ballroom.
Pet insurance tips
Many pet owners think loving a pet is enough. That’s not true, assuming you have a pet, you need be to bound by duties towards it too. Such duties include buying pet products so you could take a good care of it, taking the animal to a vet every once in a while, and investing in pet insurance.
The latter is not as easy as it sounds. That’s because identifying the right insurance is no easy job unless you follow the tips mentioned below:
Pet animal
Insurance policies and their terms and conditions vary depending upon which animal you have as your pet. Cat and dog insurance types are different from the type you require for insuring horses and guinea pigs.
Let’s say you have a dog or a cat. By insuring it, you cover the treatment of illness, sudden accident, and also cursory wellness checkups. However, not all types of medications and treatment will be covered. If you have an exotic animal such as a snake as your pet, you need to increase the coverage for your cat/dog because snake bites are very common in the United States.
So consider the animal you are keeping as a pet before you go buy an insurance.
Maximum cap
AKA benefit schedule, it limits the amount of treatment coverage of a plan. If a vet prescribes your pet a treatment following a diagnosis, then plans with a maximum cap or benefit schedule would cover only a part of the treatment.
I know it’s not something that you want to hear, but facts are facts. The more transparent the facts are, the better. If the treatment cost is X, and the plan has benefit schedule, the coverage would be less than X, more so if you live in a large metro city.
The benefit schedule often arises confusion, which is why customers prefer the old school method in which the policy pays only a certain percentage of the veterinary bill, not the entire amount. They prefer this because they can easily calculate the percentage covered.
T&C and genetics
Thinking what terms and conditions have to do with genetics? Well, T&Cs often specify the ailment types covered by them. Cats and dogs belonging to certain breeds have more vulnerability to certain diseases than those from other breeds. If you are insuring a dog, and if the plan doesn’t include treatment cost for illnesses, which are likely to affect the dog breed, there’s no point investing in it.
Talk to a vet. Ask him what diseases are likely to affect the breed of your pet. Then talk to the insurance provider and ask him whether the plan includes treatment costs for such diseases. For example, greyhounds are more likely to have bone cancer than other breeds of dogs. Retinal atrophy is quite common among poodles. If you have any of those dogs, make sure your plan doesn’t exclude treatment for the said diseases.
Limit type
Does the policy come with a per-accident limit? Or with a per year limit? Or with a per year per accident limit? Not knowing the limit type will make your wallet lighter. How? Let’s say you buy a policy with a per-incident limit of $2000, and then one fateful day, a car hits your dog, and you take the poor animal to a hospital.
The doctor informs you the surgery and the resulting treatments will cost $6000. Since the per-incident limit is $2000, you’d have to pay $4000 from your pocket. This is a classic example of how per-incident limit amounts to out of pocket expenses. There are other limit types such as per-year limit, per-year per-accident limit, etc.
Tell your service provider to reveal the limit type, and gauge how much money you may have to spend out of pocket.
Other tips
The four tips discussed here can help you select the right policy for your pet. So you need to keep all of them in mind. Aside from these, you need to know whether the plan excludes pre-conditions entirely or only partially. Some plans have coverage for only curable conditions, and not for non-curable ones.
Simply put, do research, take advice from people, who know about pet insurance, and then invest your money.
Do you have a pet? What do you think of the tips in this article? Let us know in the comment section.