Does life always mean life?

When you’re trying to choose a pet health insurance policy, there’s one phrase that seems to leap out at you. So many of the providers assure you they offer “lifetime cover”.

You may well have heard horror stories of people who couldn’t afford to continue their pet’s treatment because the pet health insurance cover ran out once the claim reached a certain limit, or once their pet reached a certain age. So you know that “lifetime cover” is what you want.

But what does lifetime cover really mean?

A number of pet health insurance companies advertise “lifetime cover”, yet this doesn’t stop them from:

Some pet health insurance companies who claim to offer “lifetime cover” even exclude prior conditions as a condition of renewing your policy the following year!

To decide whether what the company is offering is TRUE lifetime cover, check for the following:

This means that, in the case of a pet which develops a serious condition such as heart disease at the age of 2, if the policy provides £4,000 per condition per year for life, you would have £4,000 per year available for the pet’s treatment for that condition for the rest of the pet’s life. If the pet develops other conditions, those conditions would each receive the same level of cover.

Pet health insurance providers know that “lifetime cover” is what most customers really want, so they like to persuade you that this is what they offer. Unfortunately, not all providers are very good at explaining clearly precisely what it is that they actually provide. You have to do a lot of digging to find out the details.

But do it. Don’t just grab the first pet health insurance policy that claims to offer lifetime cover. Make sure you get exactly what you want and need for your pet.