by Stacy K

Created on: April 15, 2009

So you've decided to get a new pet, but have you considered insuring your new pet? Pet health insurance is basically like human medical insurance. It helps pay for the veterinary costs associated with accidents and illnesses that happen during the pet's lifetime. Veterinary bills can add up quickly and unexpectedly, so it's important to be financially ready in case a surprise incident should happen. When considering pet insurance, it's smart to invest sooner rather than later.

Enrolling a pet when it is young maximizes the benefits of insurance for many reasons:

1. It ensures that almost everything that happens in your pet's life is covered. If your pet gets sick and hurt often and it is insured, then all of these accidents would be covered by the insurance company. However, if you decide to sign up for insurance after paying for many veterinary bills, you are protecting yourself for the future, but you have already spent a lot of money that you wouldn't have had to spend if you had insurance for your pet. If you enroll your pet sooner, you don't have to learn the hard way that medical bills can be very expensive.

2. Insurance greatly reduces your pet's risk of "pre-existing conditions". These are any kind of condition affecting your pet that happens before you are enrolled with pet insurance. Most companies only cover conditions that occur after you are successfully enrolled with insurance (it is a business, after all). If something happens to your pet before it is enrolled, you will typically have to pay the vet yourself.

3. You get the most back from your policy. When you insure a pet's entire life, instead of just the second half of it, you can be sure that most of these major incidents will be covered and you don't have to worry about pre-existing conditions.

4. You get peace of mind. Knowing that your pet is covered in case anything bad happens, especially during times when the money is tight, is a very reassuring thought. You don't have to calculate how much of your next paycheck you will need or whether you have enough stored up in the bank.

It's a crazy world out there and you never know if your pet might get hit by a car, which can cost up to $4000 in veterinary bills, or swallow a foreign object which can cost about $3000 for surgery to remove a swallowed hair pin (source: http://www.trupanionpetinsurance.com ).

There is no way of knowing if your pet will experience serious accidents or illnesses within its lifetime. But if you are a pet owner who considers your pet as a part of the family then you don't want to go through the stress of worrying about a suffering pet and being unsure of whether you have enough money to help them feel better. Think about insuring your pet because you're better off knowing someone is there to help you pay the bills than to be sorry with an empty bank account, or worse, a euthanized pet.

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