A few weeks ago, you’ll remember that Tiki came down with a very high (104.8 degree) fever and spent two days on an IV. Her illness meant that we made our first pet insurance claim and we wanted to keep you posted on its progress through the system. The cause of Tiki’s fever was never discovered although they ran blood and urine tests, X-rays, and tick titers. Thankfully the IVs brought down the fever, and a week of antibiotics returned Tiki to her usual bouncy self.
Our pet insurance company is Trupanion. (We are not affiliated with them in any way; we just researched and liked the terms of their insurance so we selected them.) We have a $500 per incident deductible. You can select the deductible you like but we thought that expenditures under $500 we could absorb. Anything more would be a blow to our always tight budget. At the same time, we wanted to keep our monthly premiums down so we selected the $500 deductible so you’ll see that it’s deducted from the claim.
The claims process was very easy. Since this was our first claim for Tiki, we had to submit all her veterinary records. She’d gotten sick on a Sunday so we hadn’t taken her to our usual vet so we had to obtain records both from the vet where she was hospitalized and from the vet she’s been seeing since we adopted her. Of course, there are no records for Tiki’s earliest months before her adoption but that was not a problem at all. We assembled all the records together with a short claim form and dropped them in the mail.
First we received an email confirmation that the claim had been received. About five days later, we received another email that the claim was under review by the claims adjuster. Two days later, we received the results of the claim in two emails (one for each day’s charges. Since Tiki had gone home overnight, we’d paid each day’s bill separately so they were treated as different claims.)
Here’s the first day’s claim:
Financial Summary
Total Claim Request $827.79
Eligible Costs $778.29
Deductible Applied -$500.00
Total Claim Paid (90% coverage) $250.46
Itemization of Costs Not Included
Consultation/Examination -$49.50
And here’s the second day’s claim:
Financial Summary
Total Claim Request $541.88
Eligible Costs $538.24
Deductible Applied -$0.00
Total Claim Paid (90% coverage) $484.42
Itemization of Costs Not Included
Unrelated Charges on Receipt -$3.64
Unrelated charges explanation: Hill’s® Prescription Diet pet food – 50% (ID & WD)
In all, we’ll be receiving a check for over $700. This will be a big help to our budget!
Recently I did a phone interview with a major women’s magazine about pet insurance and the reporter asked me if I thought pet insurance was a good idea. I said that I definitely thought it was whenever possible, otherwise people need to self-insure. As you can see by the expenditure on Tiki’s hospitalization, though, even an illness of just a couple days could wipe out a self-insurance savings account. I’m very happy we have insurance for our dogs!
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