Coverage for Hereditary Conditions

A lot of us love pure bred dogs and cats, but they do have a higher incidence of hereditary conditions than their mixed breed cousins. I'm corresponding with a woman now that has a Wheaten Terrier with Glaucoma secondary to hereditary lens luxation.

She's looking at some pretty pricey surgery by a veterinary eye specialist to save her dog's sight. I wish she had a PurinaCare policy. We cover hereditary conditions. In her case we couldn't cover it now because it is pre-existing.

Most of the other companies do not provide coverage for hereditary problems under any circumstances.

Does Your Pet Have Pet Health Insurance?

I was curious about how the pet health insurance industry is doing so I did a Google search (have yet to get used to Bing, but I hear it's a good engine, also)...and anyway, I ended up on the  About.com: Veterinary Medicine site which has loads of information on this topic.

Just for fun, I took Dr. Janet Tobiassen Crosby, DVM's poll, which asks: Do you have insurance for your pets? My answer had to be "no, but maybe someday" as I will have it when we get a new dog, but I don't have it now. (btw, David Goodnight, President and Chief Operating Officer for PurinaCare® Pet Health Insurance has an interview on Dr. Tobiassen Crosby's site).

Once you take the poll, you're offered the results and I was a bit surprised by the results.

National Dog Show Spotlights Therapy Dogs

Purina sponsors the National Dog Show every year on Thanksgiving Day (I watchted last year and will watch again this year) and it's better than...almost anything. It certainly beats reality shows with "humans". Ok, there are humans in the National Dog Show, but they are eclipsed by the dogs.

David Frei, who returns as one of the show commentators (along with John O'Hurley - former actor who portrayed J. Peterman on Seinfeld), says, "If you have a dog, it's the alma mater factor; you compare your own dog lying on the sofa next to you with the Champion Retriever or Brittany you see on TV."

I'm not sure I agree completey with that. First of all, my dogs are not allowed on the sofa (sorry, my house, my rules and yes, I love my dog just as much as you love yours), and second of all -

Just Wait Until Next Year

For lots of baseball fans the words "wait til next year" bespeak the eternal optimism of the fan. We may have lost out this year but we'll get em next year for sure. Readers that live in Chicago and follow the Cubs learn this phrase shortly after they mutter "mama and dada."

Other fans, myself included, that lose out in the playoffs, prefer something like, "We was robbed!" to convey our sense of loss. For us, "We was robbed," is invariably followed by, "Just wait til next year."

I'm over this baseball season and it wasn't my intention to do a baseball post on a pet insurance blog, but these two baseball euphemisms could be germane to our favorite topic. Just one more reason to know what's in your policy.

Neighborhood Pet Circus

We have a lot of dogs and cats in our immediate neighborhood. When Tom and I are out walking, we're very often greeted by barks from little dogs and big dogs, stuck behind chain-linked fences. All of them are pretty loud in their early morning hellos, and when they tire of barking at us, they run around their yards barking at each other.

Just the other day I came across this article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel about another neighborhood full of pets. Dan Harper, the writer, says, "If you want to love your neighbors, you'd better love their pets." And he then goes on to describe his neighborhood as a pet circus. One he and his wife, apparently, enjoy watching but not actually participating in. They do not own any pets.

Dr. Bill Discusses Separation Anxiety

Petopia.tv has a video of our own Dr. Bill Craig discussing the issue of separation anxiety with a pet owner whose dog just does not like it when she leaves the room. I suspect many of us know this feeling... and have struggled to deal with a pet that doesn't want us to go anywhere without her (or him). (note: Yvonne had to correct the Petopia.tv link...it was incorrect in the original post. Nov 9th, 09)

Luckily, we had a houseful of people when Carmie was growing up, and then, when the kids went to college and I had to go to work, she seemed to adjust rather well. Our cat, Wabby, is happy as long as someone is around to feed her on time!

But, my daughter does have issues with her Greyhound, Twiggy. So, I'll be sending her the link to this video so she can partake of Dr. Bill's advice.

Benefit Schedules or Benefit Limits

If you are considering purchasing pet health insurance and the provider uses something called a "Benefit Schedule" or "Benefit Limits" you'd better have a vet or an accountant in the family to help you figure it out. I am a vet and the policy I looked at this morning was really hard for me to understand. 

A "Benefit Schedule" is a listing of literally hundreds of conditions and diseases that might befall your pet and the diagnostic procedures that your vet might use to figure out what's going on. Not only that, but there is a five column chart with each listing that further modifies the potential benefit. Some insurers use these tables to determine how much you might be reimbursed on a given claim. Oh, and there are two "benefit schedules" one for each plan and one pays less than the other.

 

Is it Really Covered?

When you buy comprehensive pet health insurance you expect it to be comprehensive. That seems pretty straight forward. In reality, it appears that there are different interpretations of what comprehensive actually means. Let me give you a couple of examples.

Wellness care. Most of us would probably define this as the things we need to do on a regular basis to keep our pets healthy. We call this Preventive care and it is covered in our PurinaCare Plus Preventive Care policy. You can see what we cover here and what we will pay towards those procedures.

 

Some insurers don't have wellness coverage at all and some others offer it but exclude certain important components. And some that do offer wellness plans don't pay out much for the given procedure.

Dr. Bill's Boo Advice: Or How to protect your pets on Halloween

It's that scary, spooky time of the year again. We wouldn't be doing our job if we didn't include a post about Halloween hazards. Dr. Bill recently put together the Top Halloween Pet Hazards - including the admonition about chocolate.

Really, don't we all know this by now: chocolate is toxic to dogs. A bag of great tasting goodies from the chocolate family might be mouth-watering for us (including our dogs), but it's best to keep that bag of goodies far, far from Fido's reach. If this is news to you, I'm glad I could share it. Don't even be tempted to share that chocolate with your dog. Give him or her a nice doggie treat, instead.

Here are three other Halloween hazards, compliments of Dr. Bill, which you may not have thought of:

Per Incident Deductibles

The deductible is the amount of money you have to pay out of pocket on veterinary care before your insurance kicks in. It's just like the deductible you probably have on your car and home owners insurance policy. 

At PurinaCare, we offer a choice of deductibles. For PurinaCare Without Preventive Care the deductible choices are $100, $250, $500 and $1000. For PurinaCare Plus Preventive Care the choices are $250, $500 and $1000. As with your own car, homeowners and probably health insurance, the higher the deductible the lower the monthly insurance premium.

 

And this is the important part. Our deductibles are annual deductibles, not per incident deductibles.