Lifetime pet insurance cover, so long as your pet isn't ill or injured.

An "Industry standard" does not cover your pet for the first two weeks of cover.

Did you know?

The pet insurance industry promotes pet suffering.

Unfortunately for us all, I have fallen foul of a glitch in the insurance world that strikes to the heart of two of my sources of passion. Firstly the care and wellbeing of animals and the secondly the unfair and immoral workings of the Insurance industry. How long will we accept unfairness and cheating to be the normal course of business?

Let me address the second point first. When taking out insurance, the insurance company has a number of choices. They can make specific restrictions to your policy, of which they have to advise you.  They can choose to not insure you. They can make general clauses that catch a number of issues (which they do not tell you) whereby they expect you to run through the 1 million word T’s & C’s in 4pt text. 

If it is buildings insurance, for instance, the company has the opportunity to survey the property to ascertain the level of risk to which they are exposing themselves. Rarely do they take up this option before offering to take your money.  They will of course exclude a number of things to make sure they are protected from paying out, by things outside your control, earthquakes, for example, or other acts of God. 

There is an excellent film ‘The Man Who Sued God’ where Billy Connelly falls foul of this 'Act of God' clause.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZfJywXiRyw

If a subsequent claim, for instance, is to repair a leaking flat roof, the insurance company will send an assessor to determine if the damage is historic. In other words, was the leak caused by age deterioration of the roof? If the leak is caused just because the roof wore out over a number of years, as so often happens, the insurer will refuse to pay out as the 'damage' was caused mainly before they insured the roof. They had an opportunity to exclude the roof from the policy but instead they use weak, clever and complicated language (buried in the T’ & C’s) and delays.  I call this ‘passive bullying’ and is prevalent behaviour adopted by insurance companies to make it so difficult to argue the case that most of us just give up and accept our loss as a part of life.  

Of course you have the option to complain to the Financial Ombudsman. The single thing we can all be sure of is that the Financial Ombudsman will, after months of delays, tell you what you already knew in the first place, that the insurance company is operating within the contract.  Of course they are. But an unfair contract is no contract at all, especially when the entire industry collude to ensure consistency.

BUT, if you can call any policy, ‘insurance cover’ at least you can be comfortable that the insurer covers you from the date of the policy. This is NOT THE CASE with Pet Insurance.

Which, USwitch, Go Compare, Compare the Market all encourage us to ‘shop around’ for the best deal on insurance.  This is dangerousbecause the insurance industry are determined to stop this practice and penalise all of us for doing so. 

Q: How do they do this?

A: A pet insurance industry standard, is that for the first TWO WEEKS (14 DAYS) of a new policy, YOU ARE NOT COVERED.

I have a cat.  He was ill and I took him to see a Vet at the first sign that he was suffering. (As I hope any responsible pet owner would do). It turns out that he had a bacterial infection (probably from a scrap with another cat) and had developed a viral infection as well.  Needless to say he was very poorly.  

I had changed my pet insurance, by shopping around. Only to discover I was not insured for the first two weeks. Something to do with an industry standard (which it turns out that it is) and also to do with the customer’s right to cancel in the first fourteen days for as little as a change of mind.

Imagine if this was Car Insurance!

“Sorry sir, we can’t pay out for that accident as you are not covered for the first two weeks….. oh, and by the way we are reporting you to the police for driving without insurance!

So to my first passion, the suffering and wellbeing of animals. If I had waited another two days….. just two days, I would have been covered and ‘Lifetime Pet Cover’….. (which clearly isn’t lifetime Pet Cover’ because my pet could have died before the cover actually took effect) would have paid out. But then they don’t pay out for pet’s dying, (presumably this is their hope).

If I had left two more days before contacting my Vet, my cat’s prospect of recovery would have been very much worse.  This clause is in ALL PET INSURANCE therefore promotes very poor animal welfare.  It actually ACTIVELY discourages people from responding to their pet’s illnesses or accidents, promoting prolonged suffering. 

They claim this is not their intention, I’m not so sure. Can the entire industry have missed the point? I don’t’ think so. Excuse me, but I am old enough to be cynical.

Additionally this ridiculous escapism adopted by ALL PET INSURERS (supported by the Financial Ombudsman), increases the cost of treatment: symptoms tend to get worse and rely on more medicine, more intervention, more overnight care…. and so on.

Is it not time for this industry to start to abide by the codes of fairness to which  other industries are held accountable?

Financial Services have been illegally and immorally ripping of their customers for more than 30 years. They were only caught, red handed by the way, by the collapse of all financial systems in 2008. And had to pay back billions in compensation. (They still ended up financially better of than if they had not acted illegally in the first place.  And did we see any prosecutions of the CEO’s, the very people making the policies– NO). But at least the FCA pretend to monitor and check the industry these days.

But the FCA is NOT checking the pet insurance industry effectively or we would not allow an entire industry to cheat us and fall foul of the very thing they claim to promote – pet welfare!