Pet Policies

It seems the pet insurance war is heating up. The New York Times ran an article on Sunday about a new insurance sales agent: one that specializes in pet insurance! According to the paper, "The specialty is small: there are less than 600,000 insured pets," and there are fewer than 500 agents that sell pet insurance. But, according to John Volk, a consultant for the industry, it is a projected area of growth.

As many of you know, I have pet insurance for my two dogs. Too many trips to Penn's emergency veterinary service, (including one where they wouldn't call a surgeon until I wrote a check for $1200 on the spot) taught me the psychological benefits of shelling out about $300 a year per pet to know I would get back some of my expenses for extraordinary and unexpected procedures. I registered for it on-line and at the time there was only one company offering policies: VPI in Brea, California.

Now competitors include Trupanion in Seattle, Petplan, USA and Nestle Purina which is currently offering insurance in Canada with plans to expand to the US this spring. And while the concept of pet insurance for companion animals is fairly new, the practice of purchasing insurance for horses has been around for a while. One of my brothers, for example, was until recently, in the equine insurance business.

As I understand it, policies for thoroughbreds are usually placed with big name insurance companies, Chubb for instance handles quite a few. As the horse increases in value so does its insurance and there are always opportunities to up the ante. These are essentially life insurance policies that insure against acts of nature (fire, hurricanes, floods) and catastrophic injury. They are not, to my knowledge, health insurance policies which is where they differ from those being offered for companion animals.

And you can be sure there are lots of rules that govern when equine insurance policies can be redeemed just as there are many horror stories of owners trying to collect claims.

The bottom line seems to be that as veterinary medicine continues to push its boundaries and provide services to animals that rival those offered by human medicine, many consumers are willing to pay the price. Will it be long before horses are considered companion animals? An interesting question and one that these growing industries might banking on.