What Are the Benefits of Pet Health Insurance?

TJ Houk, chief data officer of Data and Analytics at Trupanion, discusses the benefits of pet health insurance for veterinarians and pet owners.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“One of the things that I find really interesting is the amount of time that the veterinarian and the pet owner have to spend talking about care and talking about the cost of care. In the case of human care, in dental or in medicine, for the most part, they’re about to just go and have their services done and in animal health, what often happens is that the pet gets suboptimal care because of cost and they have to do a constant trade-off between the optimal care and something that is cost-effective or affordable.

Pet health insurance is going to alleviate that barrier to care; it’s going to be able to step in and provide a product where the next time that the pet is sick or injured, the pet owner and the veterinarian can just have the conversation about what the best treatment is, not worry so much about the cost of care, and then the pet is going to get the best care and then that’s also going to be the best outcome for the veterinarian, because that veterinarian both is able to practice the medicine that he or she really wants, and also get paid for it appropriately. The pet owner also wins in that situation because they have the peace of mind and don’t have to go through concerns about what this might cost or what financial impact that may have.”