Mabel spent her ninth birthday the way she spends most of March: flattened on the radiator shelf Caleb built her, one paw hanging over the edge, ignoring the can of Fancy Feast I'd opened in her honor until it cooled to whatever temperature she considers acceptable. Nine. When I found her in a cardboard box outside the Coon Rapids clinic, she fit in one of my hands and I was twenty-three.
Somewhere around that birthday, with Hank's eight-week X-rays finally behind us, Caleb and I started having the same conversation after the dishes most nights. Should we insure the cat?
Last April I wrote about why the dog has a policy and the cat doesn't. The short version was my staff discount: 30% off at my own clinic, an indoor cat, and a pet fund that could handle her routine care and even last June's dental. The "(Yet)" in that title was me hedging. This winter the hedge started to look like a plan.
The case against
I want to be fair to the side of the argument that kept us from doing this for years, because it isn't wrong.
- Her most likely problem is already excluded. Three extractions last June mean dental disease now counts as pre-existing. A new policy will almost certainly carve it out, and teeth are exactly what I would have bet on for an older cat.
- She's healthy. Her first senior bloodwork in October came back normal. She eats, she naps, she runs the house.
- Premiums climb with age. A policy started at nine costs more at ten and more again at eleven. We'd be buying in at the pricey end of the curve and staying there.
- The discount still covers a lot of ground. Exams, bloodwork, a round of antibiotics: at my clinic, all of it is 30% off before we pay a cent.
Caleb's version of this argument is shorter. "She's never sick," he said one night, while Mabel sat on his chest like a paperweight. That isn't strictly true (the teeth), but I knew what he meant.
The case for
Then January happened. Hank's knee showed us what care costs once it leaves my building. The discount doesn't follow us to an emergency hospital, a referral surgeon or a rehab practice, and those are the places the big bills come from. Hank's surgery in Blaine was $6,840. Insurance paid most of it. If that had been the cat, we would have paid all of it.
The pet fund isn't where it used to be, either. It bottomed out at $255.70 at the end of January, after we paid off the surgery card, and it's back up to $985.70 now, with $150 a month going in starting April 1. Mabel's dental cost $1,183 even with my discount. If she needed that tomorrow, the fund couldn't cover it alone.
From the front desk: the hardest insurance conversations I have at work aren't about denied claims. They're with people trying to buy a policy for an animal who is already sick, and learning what "pre-existing" means on the worst possible day. Every year we wait gives Mabel another twelve months to develop something that would then be excluded for the rest of her life. Waiting doesn't really save money. It just quietly moves the risk onto us.
What we need to know first
We did the math the boring way, on a notepad I brought home from work. If a sensible policy for her lands somewhere around $30 to $40 a month, that's $360 to $480 a year before she ever gets sick. Put into the pet fund instead, that money would take years to cover one weekend at an emergency hospital. Neither side wins on arithmetic alone, so it comes down to what the policies actually say. Before we sign anything, I want answers to four things:
- How each company words the dental exclusion, and whether it means every tooth forever or only the problems already in her records.
- Whether there's an age cutoff for new enrollment, and how much premiums tend to rise at each renewal for an older cat.
- How long the waiting period is for illnesses.
- What the annual limit is. A cat probably doesn't need unlimited, but a cap that's too low defeats the point.
So this week I'm collecting quotes from five companies, asking for the same deductible and reimbursement options where I can so they line up side by side. I'll share what comes back. Your cat's age, your zip code and your own savings would land this math somewhere else entirely, so read ours as one household's numbers and nothing more.
Mabel walked across the laptop twice while I filled out the first form. She'd like it on the record that nobody asked her.
