The cheapest quote was $24 a month. The most expensive was $58. Same nine-year-old gray tabby, same zip code, same evening, same cup of tea going cold next to the laptop.
Last month I wrote about our back-and-forth over insuring Mabel. This is what happened when I stopped arguing and asked for numbers. I got quotes from five companies: Healthy Paws, Trupanion, Embrace, Pumpkin and Lemonade. I'm not going to pair prices with names. Quotes change, they depend on your pet and where you live, and at the clinic we don't steer clients toward a particular insurer, a habit I'd like to keep here. What I can share is what moved the price and how the different structures treated an older cat with a dental history.
For the record, here's what I typed into five forms: indoor-only spayed female, born around March 2017, a dental cleaning with three extractions last June, normal senior bloodwork last October.
What moved the price
Almost all of the spread came from three dials.
- Deductible. Choices ran from low to as high as $1,000, depending on the company. Four of the five used an annual deductible that resets each policy year, the same kind Hank has. One used a per-condition deductible, which you pay once for each condition and then not again for that condition. That can work nicely for one long-running problem and less nicely for a string of small, unrelated ones.
- Reimbursement. Most offered some mix of 70, 80 and 90 percent. Each step up added a few dollars a month.
- Annual limit. Some offered caps like $5,000 or $10,000, and some offered unlimited coverage. Unlimited was never the cheap option.
The $24 quote paired a high deductible with 70 percent back and a modest cap. The $58 quote was a low deductible, 90 percent and no cap. Everything else landed in between, and it was eye-opening how fast a "cheap" policy got expensive once I made it look like Hank's.
How they handled her teeth
This was the part I cared about most, and it's the hardest part to see on a quote screen. The answers fell into roughly three camps:
- Dental disease excluded entirely for her, for life, because of the history.
- Only the specific problems in her records excluded, with wording suggesting some conditions might be reconsidered after a long enough stretch with no symptoms or treatment. I'd want that in writing before I counted on it.
- No real answer until a records review, which happens after you enroll, usually at the first claim.
None of them would promise to cover dental disease in a cat with three extractions on her chart, and I didn't expect them to. Mostly I wanted to know which policy would leave me guessing. The records-review answer made me the most nervous, not because it's unfair, but because I like knowing what I bought before I need it.
A few other things I noticed. Illness waiting periods ranged from about two weeks to about a month. Several companies offered wellness add-ons, and I skipped every one, since with my staff discount on routine care the add-on would cost us more than it saves. And the sample policies were far more useful than the quote pages.
What we picked
We're going with a mid-priced quote at $31.75 a month: a $500 annual deductible, 80 percent reimbursement, a $5,000 annual limit and a 14-day illness waiting period, with dental disease excluded as pre-existing. That's $381 a year.
- An annual deductible works the way Hank's does, so there's nothing new to learn.
- Going from 90 to 80 percent saved real money every month, and on the size of bill we're insuring against, the extra 10 percent is something the pet fund can absorb.
- A $5,000 cap covers the kind of bill I see most often for older cats: an emergency weekend, a hospital stay, a big diagnostic workup. It wouldn't cover the worst case. If something ever blows past $5,000 in a year, the rest is ours, and we decided we can live with that risk at $31.75 more easily than we could live with $58 every month.
The exclusion reads the same on the quote and in the sample policy, which is what I was waiting to see. I'll read the full policy once more with a highlighter this weekend and set it to start in mid-April.
All of this is what we saw when we looked, for one cat in one zip code. Your quotes will come out different, so get your own and check current terms in the sample policy before you trust anyone's summary, mine included. The pet tab has a new line waiting for its first entry: Mabel, $31.75.
