Affordable Pet Insurance for Your Animal's Health Care

If you have a pet, particularly the most traditional cat or dog, you are probably well aware of the many expenses required of you to invest in their overall animal health care and well being. Most animals require annual shots, vaccines, and preventive routine checkups with the veterinarian, and then of course, you have to account for the unfortunate surprise illnesses or injuries that could potentially occur to your pet. These doctor's visits for animal healthcare can get costly. And this is just for your pet. If you have your own medical and healthcare needs to tend to, or those of your family and children, the amount of money you must put aside to prepare for any potential pet emergencies becomes harder to collect. This common problem among pet owners all over has sparked a fairly recent wave of newly designed services, that is, affordable pet insurance coverage, to help consumers minimize their animal healthcare expenses as much as possible.

You may have briefly heard advertisements or seen website banner ads regarding various animal healthcare or pet health plans. There seem to be several companies who are starting to offer this affordable pet insurance opportunity. In order to decide which company to insure your pet's medical health with I highly recommend researching all opportunities and compare their benefits and prices. To help you begin that research process, I have gathered some important basic information regarding pet insurance from a most reputable organization, The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), for you to at least get an idea of what one of the leading pet insurance companies have to offer and gain insight as to what factors you may want to compare other of these pet health insurance plans to.

The ASPCA offers several plans to choose from when deciding on which type of affordable pet insurance to purchase for your dog or cat. There are very specific illnesses and injuries that are covered and many that are unfortunately not, so I would recommend taking a look at this comparison chart and if you can in any way anticipate the likelihood of certain illnesses in your cat or dog, keep that in mind when figuring out what type of coverage will be worth your buck.

Refer to the chart here for thorough details Plans for ASPCA animal healthcare pet health insurance plans>/A> but to give you some sort of an idea of what you are looking at, the safety plan, which I presume is the most basic option, costs $6.99/month for cats and $8.99/month dogs which is extremely inexpensive but it does only cover unexpected accidents such as poison ingestions, or injuries of various sorts. The most expensive plan is $67.14 for dogs and $76.69/month for cats and takes care of injuries, routine checkups, many other pet related medical expenses and most important chronic illness treatments and long term care.

A plus about the plan is that you can start using it the day it is effective. The only matter that requires a 30 day wait is the illness coverage. With the ASCPA pet health insurance you can go to any veterinarian and regardless of your cat or dog's age, weight or health, you are eligible for a significant reimbursement on your payment, depending on what plan you opt for. Or at least so they say. The factors such as pet's age and pre existing health conditions are matters that anyone seeking pet health insurance would be wise to look very thoroughly into. Reason being, tricky wording for advertising purposes by all of these companies often appear to promise you benefits that you really cannot receive once you view the fine print.

ASPCA pet health insurance benefit explanations are not much difference when it comes to loose definition of this important criterion. For example, they state that your pet is eligible no matter how old or what the status of their health may be, yet if you read through the Frequently Asked Questions, there seems to be a slight discrepancy. In this section it states that for the initial enrollment into the program dogs must be between 8 weeks old and younger than 13 months old. For cats, it is between 8 weeks and 15 years old. It also states that their health coverage does not provide benefits for animals with pre-existing health conditions nor for congenital/hereditary conditions or illnesses.

Here is an official list of all the exclusions:
Pet Insurance Exclusions

To sum up the analysis of the ASPCA pet health insurance plans, I definitely would recommend looking around and comparing the benefits to those of similar plans. Although the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is a reputable company that one should feel is truly out for their pets' best interests, there are a lot of contingencies you need to watch out for. Like, as I mentioned previously, the limits on coverage for various ages and health conditions of your pet.

The pet health plans did not overall impress me. I can definitely see how the basic health plan would be beneficial for someone whose animal was never prone to any illnesses or injuries and truly just needed financial help for its routine care and preventive medical visits. But to be realistic, animals get old just like people do, and just like us as well; they tend to endure physical complications. While I do feel it may be extremely difficult to find a pet health insurance service that provides reimbursement for treatment toward animals who have pre existing health problems or who are prone to complicated medical issues, if I were a concerned pet owner, that's what I'd keep looking around for.