Vets and insurance claims

[hartof]

I've never had to make a claim before and so I don't know if what I'm experiencing is normal. So I'm looking for opinions before I lose my temper.

Cat was run over and taken to a vets which is not our own on 26th March. 10th April we handed them our claims form and paid the admin fee, was advised it would be a couple of weeks. I have been chasing them for the past 3 weeks as it has still not been sent and I am repeatedly told it's waiting for a signature. Is this a normal amount of time to wait? I'm sick to death of chasing them and very fed up of being out of pocket. This is before we've even got to the insurance company so I'm expecting it to go on even longer with them!

So sorry to hear about your poor cat OP.

Filing pet insurance through the vets can be a nightmare. In my experience some vets take MONTHS to get the claims forms filed through and others take days. One vet I had lost the claim form 3 times and kept telling me to bring another round before they finally sent it through. Some vets charge the customer a fee to complete the claims form!! Some vets word their bit in such a way that you will get less money (by saying various things are completely unrelated so I've had to pay multiple fees) and I had one vet that would word things like 'This could be linked' and then the insurance company only charged me the one fee. I've also found that once the vets are paid they give little concern or priority to you getting your money back.

The best experiences I've had are the vets that allow me to file my own claims because I do it the same day and get the full payment from the insurance sent to the vet (but these vets are very rare!!).
All in all pet insurance claiming can be a bit of a nightmare depending upon your vet and your insurance company. And it's the absolute worst time because you're probably using the insurance due to some worrying incident with your beloved pet, squabbling over the insurance is the last thing you need. I don't know who your insurance provider is OP but you can try to phone them to talk things through. When my previous vet took months to get claims through I phoned my insurance company and asked what I could do and they phoned my vets office and said something along the lines of 'our customer is asking us about her claim but we haven't received it yet, is there a problem on your end?' which usually prompted the vet office to get moving.
Good luck OP and to your kitty!

No. I use Direct Line which the vets love as they do it on line.

2 different vets, always done within days.

No, not usual. DF's dog cut her leg open. The bill was £550 (sedation required) and the vet agrees to do direct claims over £300. Within days DF had an email to say that the vet hadn't been able to give a full history and they needed further information. We gave the information (date of birth and breed confirmation) and they paid out the next day.

Who are you with? We use PetPlan and they're excellent.

It's too long to wait, I think you need to escalate to the practice manager to get this sorted. It doesn't take that long to get a signature, they need to prioritise it.

It wasn't the insurance holding things up it was the vets! I have been non stop chasing them, after me telling them on Friday I wanted a manager to call it was signed off and sent to my insurance.

Funnily, I needed to get my cats past medical history from my actual vet and it took them less than 5 minutes to send it. Insurance now has everything and it will take 10 days for a decision. Hopefully it all goes through ok!

Yes in my experience it is normal. Is the vet doing the paperwork for you? If so, it’s likely to go through (because they know what to write).
Mine took weeks to come through, but the op had already been done. The vet won’t lose out, if they thought they would they probably wouldn’t do the op.

Pretty normal in my experience too.

With our old dog, our vet refused to do direct pay with our insurance company claiming they took too long to pay out (no bloody wonder when they regularly took 3-4 months to sign the forms) - so we had to pay up front and then they took months to complete the forms. Our insurance company had a 90 day limit on claims for medication and several times we missed the cut off as they took so long.

With our current girl, I made sure I chose an insurance company the vet would accept for direct pay.

We've paid the vet, they were signing the forms for us to reimbursed by our insurance. We claimed for the cremation, pet purchase price and death benefit.