When asked if I am a cat or a dog, my answer is yes. We have one from each house: Logo, who has been our good boy for two years now, and Phoebe, who came to the door as a stray kitten three years ago. They are both happy, healthy and uninsured.
For us, pet insurance has long been on the list of things we might want to look into, along with access to faster internet or credit cards with lower interest rates. But our weariness was challenged early in the evening when Phoebe showed up at the back door disoriented, limping and with a nickel-sized bald spot on her left hindquarters. I was worried about Phoebe, but I was also worried that things were about to get expensive.
It turns out that most of the roughly 65 million dog-owning and 46 million cat-owning U.S. households don’t insure them either; only 4.8 million cats and dogs are insured in this country. In a first-ever review for Consumer Reports, we evaluated eight pet insurance providers (ASPCA, Banfield, Embrace, Fetch, Healthy Paws, Nationwide Pet Insurance, Pets Best and Trupanion) based on a survey conducted among 2,061 CR members with insured pets. looking at things like the cost of the premium, the claims process and whether people had a choice of which vet to see.