Should we cancel our pet insurance.?

[Southlondoner88]

Looking for advice please, we have two rescue dogs, one we’ve had four years and she is about 6 or 7 and the other we really are not sure but say about 4 or 5, we have him two years.

The younger one has an old injury that we think he got from being hit by a car (before we got him). The vet thinks it healed by itself and he just gets in with it, he never shows pain but doesn’t like long walks, he runs and plays well and you’d have to really pull his leg for him to show any sign of pain. He’s been on gabapentin since we got him, we buy from the vet and it cost £40 per month, we claim this back with insurance every month so it’s really ‘free.’ Our other dog appears healthy, never had issues apart from colitis in the past.

Lifetime Insurance for both dogs costs nearly £90 pm, we use two different insurers because it was cheaper that way.

We’re about to buy a house and also TTC so I’m really considering cancelling the insurance as money is tight and will be even tighter as time goes on.

In all fairness is insurance even worth it? The younger dog with the injury can’t really be treated for anything. The vet told us if he gets arthritis (which is likely) his size will effect how he can be treated long term, he’s 37kg. If he ends up needing a leg amputated, he will probably be better off being put to sleep, that’s what the vet said (he did say it more politely).

They also both have bad anxiety and hate the vet to the point they won’t even go through the door of the vet, the vet comes outside the door to them so if they had something seriously wrong with them, what could the vet even do? It would be traumatising for them to have long term treatment and I’d worry they’d become aggressive.

The reason we took insurance out on them in the first place was because it seems to be the done thing in the UK, I’d never heard about it before in Ireland where I’m from and many of my relatives think we’re mad for paying for it. Also our dogs stay on leads so it limits their exposure to things that harm then (cars, scavenging).

Would you cancel insurance? I’m worried that if something happened then we’d need to use our credit cards or savings which wouldn’t be ideal or we’d have to put them down because we wouldn’t have money for treatment.

It's a gamble and gambling is a rich man's game, imo.

I keep pretty good records and just checked - I am £8939 better off when comparing what I have claimed vs what I have spent on premiums. The dog has never been seriously sick, so it's never been a case of weighing up life quality vs benefit because everything he's had has been not that serious, whilst still needing to be treated.

It's opened my eyes on how vet bills can be very high even for things that are not really bad illnesses or accdients. The kinds of things I'd never want to PTS for but that do need treating.

Personally, I'd not be without insurance now - because I'd never want to have to find £10k+ of my own money and making decisions on treatments is so much less stressful when money is not a factor (for me).

We were paying £85/month for our 10 year old lab. It stared at £28/month and increased with his age. I reckon we paid out £7-8k in insurance in those 10 years. There was a £4k/year policy limit.
Bloody hell, that ups our likely savings substantially. Probably up to about £18k in our years of dog ownership.

Public liability - people, check your house and contents insurance. We're covered by ours.

All these stories of how insured owners have come out on top financially are making me a) jealous and b) wonder how insurers make any money.

It is the nature of insurance that some will win, some will lose - but overall, 'the house will win' (i.e. the insurance companies) or they simply wouldn't stay in the business. Over the years I've been insuring dogs, many companies have withdrawn from the market, which in itself goes to show that it's not easy money for them.

The gamble is that you will never know which side you are on. As I said above, I am happy for the peace of mind of knowing that I can make decisions based entirely on the dog, and not on the strength of my bank account at that moment.

That's not at all the case with me. I am not saying that I resent never having to have made a claim - that would be fine by me and par for the course.

What I do resent is the myriad ways they have of denying your claims.

I have been unlucky enough to have been paying considerable premiums over the decades only to frequently have my claims refused, usually because they are considered to be for excluded conditions.

So I feel I have lost out twice - paid my premiums, then paid huge vet's fees and not had them reimbursed.

Just to take one of my animals. Since I have had her I have paid 4860 in insurance premiums.

In vet's fees for her alone I have paid about 7000 euros over the last three years - not counting routine things such as vaccinations - for diagnostics including x-rays and MRIs, blood tests, arthrosopies, PRP injections, lazer treatment and physio for her elbows. Then she got an infection in her spine which involved more hospital treatment and a long course of very expensive antibiotics - about 400 euros per week - which she has only just come off.

Only 1800 of the 7000 was reimbursed to me, which represented about 60% of what her spinal problem alone cost us. The rest was refused outright due to exclusions relating to her breed.

Even when they have paid, if they think the procedure was expensive compared to what they would have expected - because you went to the best animal hospital in France for instance -, then they not only subtract their customary deductible but also decide that they are reimbursing based on what they deem to be a reasonable price for the procedure, and not the actual price.

A month ago they notified me that they were doubling my premium for this animal, and also that regardless of what happened they would not pay out another penny until next January and even then only for new problems, not pre-existing issues. So I would be paying 540 euros to see me until the New Year with no prospect whatever of them paying a penny back. That is basically a way of telling your client to piss off. So piss off I did.

I should have self-insured from the outset.

I apologise for not saying what you wanted to hear…

@shockthemonkey that sounds awful. Is this a France thing with insurance, or the particular company you were insured with? I have a lab (in UK) and every single claim I have made have been paid directly to the vet with no quibbling at all, including knee surgery, MRIs etc.

The only things I had to pay for were the policy excesses and the admin fee (£25) our vet now charge to process insurance claims (didn't use to), I am surprised they don't have a separate fee for sitting on their chair in their waiting room!

What's your back up plan for sudden costly vet bills if you get rid of the insurance?

@Blanketpolicy I know, right?

It may partially be a French thing. The insurer (or non-insurer as it turns out) is Santévet.

We did get a similarly ridiculous brush off from our French buildings/home insurer once when we put in a claim for damage after a storm. They tried to wriggle out based on the wind speed at the time the damage was done. Apparently within certain parameters they weren't liable I had to sue the local authority!

Luckily they finally paid up but it took 18 months

What I do resent is the myriad ways they have of denying your claims.

That's never been my experience. I've had seven animals insured over the years and have never had a single claim denied or questioned.

Tesco have paid out in full, within 48 hours, every single time.

I have made a number of claims on pet insurance and never had one declined.

I’ve never had a claim declined either (touch wood before I jinx myself)

My old dog (a springer) was an accident prone liability who rinsed his insurance and they paid promptly every time

My current dog (also a springer) has just done her cruciate ligament and they’ve just paid out £4.5k - bit slower to pay out, but it was direct pay with the vet and half the issues were caused by the vet not sending paperwork promptly. She’s 4 and haven’t paid anywhere near that in premiums

Oh boy, do I feel totally done over now.

I am truly glad so many of you have very positive experiences. OP, based on the evidence on this thread, I would say definitely keep the insurance.

Of course I come back to my original premise though, which is that the insurers actually need to have a lot of clients who don't make claims - or whose claims they can wriggle out of - in order to thrive as businesses.

I would never complain that I'd paid my premiums and not had to claim. Rather, I would count myself lucky that my animal had remained healthy.

OP - please have a read of the recent thread about a 4yo dog with IVDD.

The owner unfortunately let insurance lapse and is now in a situation where her dog needs surgery (at a cost of 8k) which she can't afford and her survival rates are only 50/50 without it.

😧

It depends what you’re actually saying (I’m a bit confused).

I have a number of animals. I don’t insure them because the cost of insuring them is multiple hundreds per month, so instead I mentally earmark that and know that I have ‘saved’ that for future vet bills.

Despite not having insurance, there is absolutely no scenario in which any of my animals would go without veterinary care if needed. If this is what you mean, then it’s something for you to weigh up.

However, if what you mean is that you just won’t treat conditions, illnesses or injuries and your option will be to PTS then of course you should keep the insurance because that’s just awful!

The thing with insurance is, that yes most people would pay more in insurance over a lifetime of a pet than vets bills.

But that’s not what you’re paying insurance for, you’re paying it so that if something crops up you know it’s covered and you don’t have to decide whether to treat something based on whether you can afford it or not.

High cost doesn’t always equate with invasive treatment - diagnosing something can cost thousands, sometimes you get a pet with symptoms that could be something fairly straightforward to test or something like cancer, but if you can’t afford the x-rays and scans you can’t treat it even if it is something easy to treat.

Or something like an intestinal blockage can be thousands as well, I can’t imagine how horrible it would be having to have a dog put down because it ate a sock or something, knowing it could have been treated but you didn’t have 5k available to do it.

That’s what you’re paying the insurance for, the luxury of being able to decide based on what is best for your pet.

I am so glad my youngest dog is insured. He has ear problems. So far diagnosis has cost £3600. He is in for operation tomorrow at a cost of £4400, he also needs CT immediately before which is £1000. I would have had to delay that operation if it wasn't for his lifetime insurance.

I'd hate for him to be in pain.

There was a post on my local Nextdoor.com in the last couple of months by a woman trying to raise funds to pay a vets bill for her young dog who had become ill, been admitted to the vets but ultimately had died / been PTS. The bill was around £2500. When asked why the dog wasn’t insured she cited the cost of living crisis. She gambled and is now lumbered with a large bill and doesn’t even have the dog.