Polling the community here. Please share your experience with pet insurance providers in the USA. The good, the bad and the in-between. If not from the USA, please list the country.
Do they accept older cats? Recently adopted cats from a shelter? Preexisting conditions? How much is the premium? Etc.
My job offers subsidized pet insurance as a perk, and even then, the monthly fees are so prohibitively expensive for my cat that it would be a financial mistake to pay for insurance rather than save the money and use my savings in an emergency. Not to mention that I’d have to with insurance anyway, since the premiums were so high.
As a rule, non-essential insurance (including pet insurance) is designed to be a losing bet as you are paying for the average cost of an insured animal’s care, plus the overhead of hundreds of people’s wages.
The only reason I could see you paying for it is if you know your pet will absolutely need it in the future and it will pay for itself, in which case I would use insurance with the smallest premium. Best of luck.
Plus all the other business overhead, plus tidy shareholder profits.
I will say that over the lifetime of my two cats so far (one died last August, the other is now 13y old), the insurance paid less than if I had just saved up the money and paid it myself, and by quite a margin.
It depends on whether you can do that, however. On average you’ll save money by paying it yourself, but you need to be in a situation where you can have the cushion of money around to finance cat surgeries and dental work and so on.