Got a pet and want insurance? Skip VPI.

April 11th 2010

I hate insurance. Health insurance, car insurance, renter’s insurance, and now: Pet insurance.

That said, I’d like to share with the world a bit of information that could prove useful to anyone looking for pet insurance. The big name in pet insurance is VPI, so that’s what we got for our beautiful bulldog Bula. The first several encounters with VPI was typical of much insurance:

Have a problem.
Submit a claim to get reimbursed for said problem.
Receive a reply for the insurance company stating that either they denied your claim, or are reimbursing you for a small fraction of your claim due to some compensation schedule.

Run of the mill disappointment.

However, our chew-happy puppy ended up swallowing a mini-tennis ball (awesome), and this led to exceptional disappointment.

Our vet gave us two options for removing the ball from Bula's gut:

Cut him open, stitch him up, and help him recover for 2 weeks on a bunch of drugs while he wears a cone of shame.
Use an endoscope to go down his throat and retrieve the ball with a claw (yes, like the arcade game).

Option #2 was the easy choice, but we decided to consult with the official VPI claim schedule first, just to make sure we wouldn't get screwed over on the $1000+ procedure. Luckily, VPI covered "Foreign Body Medical" so we proceeded with the endoscopy.

Jumping to the interesting part, the claim was denied, saying that the procedure was a "medical condition" and not "surgical", so the claim was denied. Incredulously, I clarified that they would have reimbursed the claim had we opted to cut open our dog, and they responded in the affirmative.

So there you have it: VPI Pet Insurance incentivizes more harmful, more invasive procedures. And their customer service was rude and unsympathetic, despite several official appeals by me.

We cancelled VPI and are now using Trupanion, another pet insurance company. So far so good.