Part 1: Why Pet Insurance Sucks
Looking for help with vet bills through pet insurance? Well think again. And it is just not me that beleives that pet insurance is not worth the price. If you read Consumer Reports, Reader’s Digest, or Forbes magazine you would know that they don’t think too highly of pet insurance. In fact if you are a regular reader, pet insurance is mentioned every year in these magazines as something to avoid.
So why do all these highly respected magazine think so lowly of pet insurance? Well they mentioned several reasons and I will be going over these in the next few blog posts. Today we’ll only talk about a couple of reasons.
One of the biggest reasons why pet insurance is bad is because of pre-existing condition and breed specific conditions.
A pre-existing condition is a medical condition your dog has at the time you purchase the pet insurance policy. For example if your dog has diarrhea when you buy the pet insurance policy or any time during the waiting period that could be classified as a preexisting condition.
For example if your puppy has diarrhea in June when you buy the policy it might be classified as a pre existing condition even though it was a small bout of diarrhea. Then, you know puppies, they have another bout of diarrhea in August completely unrelated to the bout of diarrhea in June.
You think you are covered for vet bills from the August visit? Likely not, because since pet insurance companies decide by themselves what they will and won’t apy for, they will likely not pay for the second bout of diarrhea and claim it is a pre-existing condition.
They can get away with this because there is not much oversight for them, and also they are solely the ones to decide about counts as a pre-existing condition. Also they can classify how long they will decide a condition is pre existing? For example they could say your dog needs to be free from diarrhea for one year before they would pay for the medical condition.
In fact some of the more major disease, your dog has to be free from them for one year for them to not count as a pre-existing condition.
