How To Compare Pet Insurance To Get The Best One

With vet bills increasing dramatically over the last decade, many people are deciding it makes sense to get pet health insurance to cover the risk of expensive vet bills. Comparing benefits and reviewing extras provided by pet health insurance cover is important if you are going to get the best pet insurance for your dollar. I will cover a number of important factors that you need to consider when getting pet health insurance.

Excess levels
With all insurance policies, you can select a level of excess that you pay when you make a claim on your policy. The higher the excess you select when taking out the cover, the lower your premium will be. You need to weigh up the costs and the benefits of a high excess to reduce your premium, because when you make a claim, you need to find the cash to make up the difference of your vet bill. Some policies ask you to select a specific dollar amount that you will pay, while others will cover a certain percentage of the bill. Therefore on the bigger claims, you could be left paying more. You also have less certainly about how much you will be out of pocket.

Annual Benefit Limits
Most pet insurance covers have different options regarding the level of cover. You can get basic cover for accidents or more comprehensive cover for accident and illness. The different types of pet insurance will also have different annual benefit limits, so determine if they are adequate for your needs.

Routine Pet Insurance cover
There are also pet health insurance covers that include routine pet health expenses cover, either as part of the package or separately. These can be very good value as you dont normally have an excess requirement for these, and you can get cover for a range of things such as de-sexing, preventative medicines, micro chipping, worming treatments, tick treatment, registration fees, and a host of other benefits. There is normally an annual benefit limit for these routine pet costs.

Exclusions
Read the policy document for any exclusions. Most insurance policies have exclusions to keep premiums down. Some example of pet insurance cover exclusions include any pre existing conditions that showed clinical signs when you took out the policy, pregnancy and elective surgery. Similar to personal insurance.

Waiting Periods for your policy
When can you Claim? Most policies allow you to make a claim for vet bills the day after you are approved, for accidents, but you normally have to wait, up to 30 days for illness related conditions.

Cooling Off Period
Do you get a cooling off period with your pet insurance cover? A number of policies allow you up to 14 days to get out of the cover, as long as you have not made a claim.

Discounts for your Pet Health Insurance
Does the policy offer any discounts for more than one pet being covered? Some policies do, and the discount grows for each extra pet you insure.

Summary
Pet health insurance is being recognized as just as important as personal health insurance, car and house and contents insurance. Vet bills can run into thousands of dollar and if you dont have pet insurance cover you are running a big risk. There are a number of different types of pet insurance policies on offer, so when you check them out, keep the above points in mind, to get the best deal on your pet health insurance cover.