Pet Insurance

Karen2905

So, my question got lost in the Monday Morning flurry of activity on the Pet board.  So I thought I would ask here.

Anyone have Pet Insurance?  We're looking into it for our upcoming greyhound... Any thoughts anyone has on the matter would be welcomed!

kelliejo83

We don't, and believe me I treat my dog like a person, so I definitely looked into it once!   It seemed expensive to me, so we didn't do it.  Our dog is pretty typical and has the annual exams, shots, etc. so nothing out of the ordinary.  If he did have something unusual, we would check it out, but that might be a pre-existing condition or something so who knows.

Fotophreak4c

i was looking into it because i bought such an expensive dog and I wanted to make sure he was covered. We put it off and didn't get it. Then a month after I got my dog he stopped walking and I literally have spent over 5k on him because we had to buy him a wheelchair, get xrays and lots of blood tests run, all kinds of medical harnesses and stuff for him, he takes expensive medications every single day, its A LOT! I would definitely do it just to be careful. I can't imagine how much money I would have saved if I had gotten it.

Reinedumonde

My parents just went through something similar, although not as severe as pp.  My mom was out running with their dog when a neighbor poodle ran out and attacked him.  The bite was so bad that it got infected and they had to give him surgery, to the tune of $2k.  You just can't plan for that kind of thing and it's so much better to be safe than sorry.

laniemarie

DH owned a retired greyhound as a kid and they had some problems pet insurance might have helped with. The greyhound almost killed another dog in a park because it looked like the rabbit he had been trained to chase. There was another incident in which the dog bit SIL's face and she had to have plastic surgery a few times to fix that.

I don't know much about retired greyhounds beyond DH's personal experience...do you know if behavior problems are common? If so I'd probably get the insurance just to be safe.

2dBride

We actually have two different kinds of insurance for our dog. One is a maintenance plan, and the other is for emergencies. For maintenance, we have one of Banfield's Optimum Wellness Plans. Basically, you pay a certain amount each month, and it covers routine medical care. It's not really insurance as such, but it's a bit of a discount over paying for each service separately. And it also lets you know how much you'll need to pay, so you don't, for example, get hit with a bunch of surprise charges when your pet needs a teeth cleaning. For emergencies, we have Pets Best Insurance. I did a lot of research when we got our dog, and most pet insurance plans limit what they will pay to a fixed schedule. Since there is no way to tell ahead of time how realistic that schedule is, you could easily discover that in the event of an emergency, the actual cost is much higher than the schedule. Pets Best does things differently. After a deductible, they pay 80% of your actual cost. When our dog got pancreatitis, it was a relief knowing that this was not going to break our budget. The one disadvantage of Pets Best is that you have to pay first, and then get reimbursement. However, they did pay quite promptly.