Is my vet's insurance billing process for ongoing treatment reasonable?

[DontKillSteve]

One of the cats is currently undergoing treatment for a flare up of an intermittent issue. It only seems to happen every few years.

The vet seems to ask me to pay after every appointment, when bill <£300 then will claim on my behalf if claim >£300.

This is really becoming confusing for me and the insurer (Petplan), who are receiving claims from me and from the surgery, for a single condition. Excess is paid and the surgery immediately receive the monies from Petplan when they claim from them.

The treatment should be concluded within a month, I’ve suggested the surgery wait until then and just invoice the insurer once the treatment is finished. I’m not sure if I’m being unreasonable here. Just wondered how other surgeries manage this.

My vets (now a Medivet practice) always bills Petplan directly except for the excess amount for the first claim of the year. Never have any problems with that, in fact they much prefer billing Petplan directly.

Thanks. I found out tonight they are also charging me an ‘admin fee’ of almost £35 for each appointment claim they submit to Petplan. This explains why they are insisting every appointment is claimed separately, what a con. I’m fuming.

WHAT??? Bloody rip off merchants!

With that level of greed, I would start to be concerned that they may be suggesting/prescribing meds as much by profit as by what's best for the cat. Same with "investigations"; my vet will always tell me what is available (they are obliged to), but will balance that with just how useful it may be in the circumstances and more often than not have told me it wasn't worth it.

Possibly time to look for another local vet?

Yes you are right. I’m going to look around once he completes this treatment. They have also been quite rude when I’ve queried this practice.

It depends on the practices policy that they should be able to give you.
As a practice we ask clients to pay treatment of less than £500 and then claim back to them, above £500 we will do a direct claim with certain companies ( there are ones we won’t do direct claims with) and we charge the direct claim admin fee once per condition per year.
Repeat ongoing treatment we ask the client to pay as this is often small amounts and will either claim each visit or do a claim after several visits which ever the client prefers.
we do get a very large number of claims and each claim can take quite a while to process.