What’s your favorite pet health insurance?

[Susanna72]

I need to get insurance for Benjamin before he’s too old. He’s four. Embrace looks pretty good but looking for advice and experience of other cat owners. I just spent $6k on care for Oliver and really wishing I had bought insurance.

 

[Alldara]

I'm with PetSecure. I keep looking at other options as my cats are still young but I haven't found anything particularly suitable.

 

[fionasmom]

Search Results for Query: pet insurance
This comes up quite a bit here and you might want to glance at some of these threads.

 

[reba]

I use Embrace and am very happy with it. The problem with all insurances is pre-existing conditions. Have them review your cats vet records and they’ll tell you what they won’t cover or what requires a waiting period. You don’t want to find that out when you go to file a claim. I have a very high deductible policy, $1,000. The way I think of it is I’m paying to predict that my vet bills for illnesses will never exceed $1,000 per cat per year.

 

[heatherwillard0614]

I want to cover my baby because I don't ever wanna be in a situation where I may really need it.. so I am looking into options and seeing what would be best and what people think about their current provider

 

[fionasmom]

Look over the search listed on #3. This is a popular topic on TCS and comes up regularly from time to time. In almost all cases, the pet owner pays up front and then is reimbursed. There are exceptions; my cat vet bills Trupanion, but it would be on a doctor to doctor basis to determine that.

 

[daftcat75]

I had done this back in January of 2022 in an expensive California zip code for a five year old female cat. You can use this as an illustration of the relative strengths and weaknesses among the companies I got quotes from. You can also use it as a guideline to collect your own quotes.

Rate	Annual	Company	Deductible	Reinbursement	Limits
$16.18	$194.16	Healthy Paws	$1,000.00	80%	none
$18.14	$217.68	Embrace	$1,000.00	90%	$30,000/year
217.62/year	$217.62	Embrace	$1,000.00	90%	$30,000/year
$27.82	$333.84	Wagmo	$1,000.00	100%	$10,000/incident, $100,000/lifetime
$25.45	$305.40	Wagmo	$1,000.00	90%	$10,000/incident, $100,000/lifetime
$29.29	$351.48	Prudent Pet	$1,000.00	90%	$10,000/year
$23.65	$283.80	Prudent Pet	$1,000.00	80%	$10,000/year
$38.59	$463.08	Fetch	$500.00	90%	$15,000/year
$46.45	$557.40	Fetch	$500.00	80%	$15,000/year
$28.44	$341.28	Pumpkin	$500.00	80%	$7,000/year
$39.49	$473.88	Pumpkin	$500.00	90%	$15,000/year
$34.36	$412.32	Trupanion	$1,000.00	90%	none
$45.59	$547.08	Trupanion	$700.00	90%	none
$79.49	$953.88	Trupanion	$200.00	90%	none

My recommendations are:

1. Max out your deductible to bring down the premium. Save up at least one deductible into a cat health emergency fund if you need to.
2. Get the highest reimbursement rate you can afford.
3. $10,000/incident sounds like a lot. But many incidents can rack up a bill like that. Try to max out your limits too. Don't assume you'll never spend more than $7000 or $10000 in a year. After all, that is why you are getting insurance. So you don't have to make a hard call like that. You pay your deductible and you have to cover the bill up front. But if it's a reimbursable expense, they'll usually reimburse you fairly quickly (two to three weeks.) Some of them even have a way to pre-approve your coverage before spending that money.

Bonus recommendation:
Pay the annual option if you can afford it. You'll be much more likely to keep your pets insured if you only have to absorb the pain of the annual premium increases once a year. Even if you don't use the insurance one year, your cat got older and they'll raise your rates for that too.

Pick the best coverage with the highest deductible you can afford to bring the premium as low as you can manage while weighing the limits against the premium. Sure, Trupanion has no limits and a 90% reimbursement rate. But it's also twice as expensive as Embrace.

I ended up going with the third line, the annual option from Embrace with a $1000 deductible. In her first year of insurance, we were reimbursed more than I expect to pay in over the next several years worth of premiums. You never want to need to use your insurance. But it really came through for us last year even with pre-existing conditions.

 

[Alldara]

My advice re: deductible is to choose a deductible that you are able to pay at any given time. I'd rather pay a couple dollars more per month than figure out where to get $1000 from in a crisis.

For someone who makes more money than me, the opposite might be true.

Also for some instances, instead of the rates rising, your deductible does.

My rates for my cats are locked in. I have chosen a deductible of $200. At age 5 it will go up to $300 and age 10, $400. I can choose to pay more per month to bring that back down. When we signed Ghost up, the representative told me it was $8 more per month per cat at Secure 2 for significantly more coverage. Previously I was paying $24 for Magnus and $27.50 for Cal. Now I pay $34 each.

 

[OllieBoy99]

I have both cats on lemonade and so far liking it. When I signed up only Oliver last year he had a history of diarrhea at the vet but bc it had been over 1 year, they didn’t consider it pre-existing. I pay around 214 per cat (including visit fee), $250 deductible, 20k limit annual and 90% coverage. The one claim we submitted last year was delt with very fast but since it wasn’t over 250, we paid out of pocket.

 

[heatherwillard0614]

Everyone is truly amazing and I appreciate you all sharing the information and experiences with me. It is really helping me in my decision. Again thank you all so so much

 

[fionasmom]

When you choose a policy, pick one with premium and care levels that you intend to keep. If you change a policy, it usually creates a new one and anything that the cat was treated for previously will become preexisting.

 

[heatherwillard0614]

fionasmom thank you for this information. I didn't even think about that being a problem. I wasn't planning on changing anything once I get one but that is a great thing to know.
Again thank you to everyone for all of the helpful information. This is all really helping more than you may know.

 

[fionasmom]

Pet insurance companies are under the jurisdiction of the state board of insurance and, as such, can be reported if there is ever a serious problem.