Dog Health Insurance…do you need it?
Considering dog health insurance? Many pet owners are facing that tough decision too. Just as health care costs are skyrocketing for you and your family, the veterinarian industry is also feeling the crunch. Medical equipment and insurance are becoming extremely costly. Procedures for pets easily run into the thousands now, and medications are outrageously priced.
I recently read this great marketing angle on a dog health insurance website: Dog health insurance offers pet owners a way to budgeting for the unexpected through a series of affordable monthly payments. Sounds convincing doesn’t it? Just like making monthly payments on your car. The only problem with that logic is that you actually get to drive the car, you aren’t paying for something that you will probably never use.
When helping consumers with health insurance quotes for their families, I always recommend making a spreadsheet to allow them to compare different scenarios and costs apples to apples. For dog health insurance, I would recommend making a similar scenario, then deciding which procedures you would actually choose to undertake for your pet.
For example, I would probably have my dog treated for a bladder infection or ingestion of a foreign object. But if he was diagnosed with cancer, I’d probably have him put down rather than undergo painful and costly treatment. See the difference? I do love my dog, but he’s not my wife. It would be a heartbreaking decision to have to make, but it would be selfish of me to require him to undergo painful surgeries and treatments that may not save his life anyway.
So sit down and have a real heart-to-heart with yourself and your spouse on your family’s plan of action on certain medical conditions before plugging those into your spreadsheet. Then plug in the number to see if dog health insurance is for you.
Can I afford a high deductible for teen health insurance?
In a previous post, I mentioned putting together a spreadsheet to compare health insurance quotes. If you’re shopping for teen health insurance, this step is even more crucial to saving money.
If you need teen health insurance for healthy kids, then you are usually weighing the cost of monthly premiums against just the cost of paying for routine exams, colds, and infections yourself. Plug the expenses you can anticipate into the spreadsheet and see what the cost differences are between a high deductible policy with lower premiums and a lower deductible policy.
Then there are the situations that parents can’t anticipate–like car accidents and sports injuries–and those that can be anticipated–such as medical risks for an obese teen or one with chronic health issues. These are the circumstances that families really need to be insured against, and why you need to really do your due diligence while researching teen health insurance.
Once you get into more costly scenarios for your spreadsheet, you’ll quickly discover that the higher the deductible, the lower the overall cost of carrying the insurance. My family chose a policy that has a whopping $4,000 deductible, but we save almost that much each year just in premiums, and this policy pays 100 percent after $5,000 out of pocket. We pay more for everyday colds and routine exams, but if someone in our family needs surgery, we literally save thousands and thousands of dollars.
Comparing Cheap Health Insurance Indiana
It is VERY important to make sure you are comparing apples to apples when comparing cheap health insurance. The best way to make accurate comparisons is to put together a spreadsheet showing premiums, deductibles, out of pocket limits, lifetime maximum limits, copays, percentages covered, and prescription coverage.
Once you have all of your information plugged into your spreadsheet, now you can play with it to find out what coverages you would have for certain scenarios. For example, you may use the spreadsheet to find you total expenses in a year with these scenarios:
- You only use routine healthcare with a couple of minor colds or infections.
- One member of your family needs minor outpatient surgery for a total of $5,000.
- One or more members of your family are in an automobile accident and run up medical bills totaling $40,000.
- Someone in your family has cancer and the medical bills climb to over $200,000 for one year alone.
Don’t forget to figure in the premiums you are paying for the year as well. Although an indirect medical expense, those premiums are usually some of your biggest medical expenses.