When my boyfriend and I brought home our squirmy seven-week-old puppy last year, we wouldn’t have even considered pet insurance if not for the experience my mother went through with our family dog a few short years ago. With a little legwork and her story in mind, we found an insurance provider that was right for us. Here’s why we went for it.
An Unexpected (Yet Costly) Surgery
My family dog Farley was a perfectly healthy Welsh Corgi for the first nine years of his life. Aside from a little dental work and a night spent in the ER for eating bad spaghetti sauce (to the tune of about $1,000), he never needed much veterinary care throughout his life beyond yearly checkups and routine vaccinations. His one tragic flaw — an insatiable appetite for pretty much anything — proved to have a major impact on my mom’s wallet just three years before his death.
After eating something the vet couldn’t identify, the object became stuck in his small intestine and required a surgery that cost $6,000 to save his life. I’ll never forget what a difficult day it was for our family; trying to make sure he’d be okay and watching my mom, without hesitation, agree to the surgery when we knew it was a huge financial burden for her. Fortunately, Farley made it through and my mom was able to pay the surgery bill, something I’m not sure we’d be able to do financially if we were faced with the situation.
Weighing the Cost of Pet Health Care
The thought of letting our pup, who has quickly become a member of our little family, be in pain or possibly die because we couldn’t afford to save him is a position I knew I never wanted to be in. Now that treatments once reserved for humans from radiation to kidney transplants are becoming available to pets, the cost help to cure these once-fatal conditions is clocking in between $1,000 and $5,000, according to MSN.com.
These expensive procedures have inflated the cost of healthcare for our pets and, although it is wonderful news that we’re able to keep our pets alive longer, the need for pet insurance to help cover these procedures becoming a better idea each day.
We chose an insurance that covers 90% of veterinary costs in addition to certain preexisting hereditary conditions at about $30 a month. Though we’ve never had to use it, the peace of mind it gives me day in and day out is worth the cost.