This is one of the most common questions asked by pet parents or anyone thinking of getting pet insurance for their beloved four-legged friend.
The answer to this question is, mostly no. The majority of pet insurance plans work the same – you pay for covered vet bills up-front and then wait for your insurance company to reimburse you. This whole process can take days or weeks, and occasionally months.
- You take your pet to the vet
- The vet treats your pet
- The vet bills you for the treatment
- You pay the bill out of your own pocket
- You make a claim
- If your claim is covered, you’re reimbursed what you paid, minus any deductible or copay
How is Paw Protect different?
Rather than making you pay the whole vet bill upfront and then waiting to get reimbursed, Paw Protect immediately sends you its share of a covered claim direct to your bank account – while you’re at the vet! Here’s how it works:
- You take your pet to the vet
- Call Paw Protect and have your claim pre-authorized straight away!
- When it’s time to pay the vet bill, call us and we’ll send you payment immediately to your bank account while you’re still at the vet. All you need to is pay your out-of-pocket costs.
Why is it a problem having to pay vet bills up-front?
Vet bills are commonly in the hundreds of dollars and often in the thousands. That’s quite a chunk for anyone to pay up-front, especially when 59% of Americans say they’d struggle to pay an unexpected bill of $500.
For many people, it means pulling out money from your savings or putting the vet bill on a potentially expensive high-interest credit card. But the sad reality is thousands of dogs and cats don’t get treated, because the pet parents simply don’t have the money to pay the bill up-front.
Why doesn’t most pet insurance pay the vet direct?
It’s a good question. Pet insurance has always tended to follow the ‘reimbursement model’: that means you have to find the money out of your own pocket to pay the vet bill, before claiming the money back from your insurer less your out-of-pocket expenses.
Is there any pet insurance that doesn’t require you to pay the vet bill upfront?
Other than Paw Protect, there are a small number of other insurers who have solutions to the issue of paying vet bills upfront. Trupanion, for example, has the capability to pay vets direct, while Healthy Paws and Pets Best are two other insurers who say they can pay the vet direct.
With Healthy Paws, you have to call them while you’re at the vet and get them to talk to the vet to access medical records and then process the claim. Pets Best, meanwhile, have partnered with CareCredit, meaning that if you have a CareCredit card you can put the whole vet bill on that and Pets Best will reimburse the card. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that you do have to qualify for the CareCredit card, and you also have to check the CareCredit website to see if your vet accepts it.