A Must Read!!!

[Savas]

Liz Weston has written an excellent article on the pro's and con's of buying pet insurance that any pet owner should read.

Here's the link (just paste it into your http line)

articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Insurance/AssessYourNeeds/ShouldYouBuyPetInsurance.aspx?page=1

[PrettyKitty1]

This is a very interesting article.  My pet is only insured by me lol. The day I cannot pay for treatment I'll use a credit card lol. I have health insurance and I NEVER go to the doctor. Not even rarely, hear me.....I NEVER EVER go to the doctor. I feel like I'm wasting my money  to be honest. Everything is so ridiculously high these days...sigh....

[Savas]

Regrettably they DO only care about money (I can't speak for other countries, mind you).

generally it doesn't seem to be a great deal when the animal gets past five, six years old. They really nail you on the charges as the age goes up, and the cost and deductible are killler. hopefully it will get better and more regulated with time.

The entire problem is as she points out, vet medicine has made leaps and bounds in the past few years. Before, it really lent itself to the whole "disposable pet" concept. But now, they have treatments and tests that are incredible!!!

But, they're charging a LOT more than is neccessary. At some point, someone got the idea that health care is an absolute necessity to...well...keep LIVING and decided they could charge whatever they bloody wanted to, as long as they standardized the industry costs.

Ironically, this is an illegal practice; but it's not hard to get around it.

All right, I'm going to stop now. This is supposed to be a helpful post that informs about pet health care, not my b*tching about the state of health care in this modern age. :)

[April2]

Thank you, Savas. I was wondering about the pet insurance. We did have it for awhile for our dog and cat but I just cancelled it. We're just going to pay as needed when the pets need to go the vet for shots or whatever. I hope I don't regret this. But we're trying to get out of debt so we're looking for ways to cut back on things. The one thing I didn't like either was with the type of pet insurance we had, if the animal died we would still have to pay the remaining amount for the year. That means that if we renewed our insurance for the year and one of them died the next month, we'd still have to shell out the money for the next 11 months on an animal that was no longer around. It sounded crazy to me. I mean our own insurance doesn't do that, right?
And since my dog and cat are getting up there in age, we just don't know how long they will live. Sometimes I think all they care about is money. We've spent so much money on our pets the last few years on tests, etc., that I just wasn't sure was necessary, at least right away. We're looking for a new vet anyway.
Thanks again for the article, Savas.