The excess is why I don’t bother.

No! its so expensive.

I found it expensive then theres the excess. but its good if you have a $2000 vet bill. I guess if you can afford it.

It’s one of things, isn’t it, if you have it you won’t need it and vice versa. I think you need to look at your pet breed, some are susceptible to certain things that require a lot of vet care. If you have one of these breeds, I would invest. Our old boy just had nearly a $1000 worth of treatment, made us wish we had insurance :/

We had it but when my dog got an infection it didn’t cover it so we got rid of it

Yes pet medical insurance can certainly be worth it.
especially when you look at the costs of surgeries with specialists, a cruciate ligament repair $4500 a ct myleogram $3500 . Spinal surgery $8k+
it’s not just little vet bills that they cover.

We looked into it for our dog, but because she is already getting old and is deaf (since birth) the cost was high and so many exclusions and fine print. Shop around.

I find there are a lot of exclusions with pet insurance. If it’s common with the bread – excluded, if it’s been diagnosed before (existing condition) – excluded, after 10 years old – excluded. So maybe if you get in early then it might be worth looking at.

Used to have but it turned out to be more expensive than car insurance. Even for a relatively young dog (and healthy) the list of exclusions etc was a mile long. Not worth it. If odds are against me and things do go wrong I’ll just have to pay. Even so, it will still be cheaper over the long run without insurance.

we went to get our little fella vetted,and found he had a heart murmer,insurance wouldn’t touch him,if you read the fine print,unless you are going to show/breed,theres not a lot going for it

An interesting point about the ages of pets and I believe pre-existing conditions are not covered. It seems quite similar to health cover for human beings.

It depends who you insure with and when. Once your pet hits 10 no-one will really insure them for much at all. But if you get in before they hit the magic number it can be good. My old insurance was really good and covered a lot and was only a minimal addition to our existing policy. But then we changed insurance agencies and the new cover doesn’t really cover anything. and when i looked around at insurance elsewhere as they were older no-one would give us any cover than just basic which doesn’t really seem worth it. – My advice – insure them before they are too old on a good cover policy then don’t change it. It really isn’t that much a month compared to a $900+ vet bill.

hope we are being a little helpful but as with anything, it is up to you and your financial situation.

check the policy to see what exactly it covers as operations are very expensive.

I’m having a doubt. Maybe with RSPCA it wasn’t the sterilization for free, but the micro-chipping. A big amount of money anyway.

Hi! I’ve got a Labrador Retriever and yes, we’ve got pet insurance, with Medibank. I must admit I regret not having looked into other insurances before going with Medibank. Because we have the health insurance with them, we were getting 10% discount on the policy and so we just did it as soon as we took the dog. (I think he had to be at least 2 months old). But with Medibank we had to pay for the sterilization for example and we’ve got an excess of $200 per condition per year. I later found out that with RSPCA we wouldn’t have paid for the sterilization and they don’t have any excess. It’s slightly more expensive though. But because my dog developed an allergy, I’m not going to change insurance, otherwise the allergy would count as preexisting condition and this way we wouldn’t be able to claim anything about that. With the insurance you get routine care back till a maximum per year and 80% back from the vet bills. I wouldn’t stay without a pet insurance, because if my dog was ever in need for an operation, we simply wouldn’t able to pay it. That’s why we keep it. It’s not cheap (around $57 per month) but it gives us peace of mind.
If I were you I would get a quote from at least 2 pet insurances, and I would surely consider RSPCA. Success!!

My sister has pet insurance as her pet is accident probe, always breaking a bone or cutting himself so for her it’s worth While.
Whereas our dog has only ever needed extra vet treatment besides general checks and immunisation once and that was becaae of his breeders care and feeding him bones and being lodged into his intestine, although the breeder covered these for us.

We aren’t going to get it, as if something major come up you can go on payment plans, but if it was going to be on going costs we would consider it.

I am pretty sure she is with the rspca one and says it’s affodable.

i would think that if you couldn’t cover expensive vet bills, then yes it is worth it. also if something happened would you want your pet to get surgery etc or would you just put it down? i think weekly/fortnightly payments wouldn’t be too bad but you would have to talk to someone to get a quote for your situation