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Pet insurance is a good idea for a lot of pets, but choosing a plan and customizing it to your financial needs can be a headache. One of the stumbling blocks many pet parents run into is pet wellness plans: should you pay for an add-on that covers routine vet visits and preventive care?
Fortunately, this is one pet insurance question that’s actually pretty easy to answer. All that’s needed is a little math.
What Are Pet Wellness Plans?
When you’re shopping for pet insurance, you’ll find that most companies offer a variety of comprehensive “accident and illness” plans. These policies cover treatment when your pet gets hurt or sick so that unexpected pet expenses don’t break your bank.
What a standard plan doesn’t cover is routine and preventive vet care—the expected vet visits.
That’s where wellness add-ons come in. For an additional monthly fee, some pet insurance companies will offer extra coverage options that you can tack on to your regular insurance. In exchange, your insurance company will cover certain categories of routine and preventive care, up to specific maximums.
Most wellness plans aren’t subject to a deductible, and you typically renew them annually.
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What Does a Pet Wellness Plan Cover, and How Much Does It Cost?
What a wellness add-on covers varies a lot—even between companies that offer similar accident and illness packages.
These are some of the offerings you might find in a wellness package, plus a sample of how much they might cover toward treatment every year:
- Annual checkups and wellness exams ($50)
- Vaccinations and shots ($30 to $50)
- Flea/tick and heartworm prevention ($30 to $50)
- Dental cleanings ($100 to $150)
- Microchipping ($20 to $40)
- Spaying/neutering ($100 to $150)
- Annual bloodwork and urinalysis ($25 to $50)
- Deworming ($20)
Pets Best, for example, might cover up to $50 in preventive care exam fees every year and $65 for flea/tick prevention, while you pay $26 per month for this and other wellness coverage. (Note that these numbers will vary depending on your location.)
Typically, the annual cost of a wellness package will be $100 to $200 less than the total of all the maximums. If you really used each category to the max, you’d save a couple hundred dollars.
It sounds like a smart bargain—but the truth is that wellness add-ons are not always a good deal. To determine if wellness add-ons work for you, you’ll have to do some math.
How To Calculate Your Wellness Plan’s Worth
Once you know what company you’d like to enroll with, review the list of routine and preventive procedures your wellness insurance would cover, then put a checkmark next to the ones you expect to need this year.
Look at your invoices to recall what you’ve paid—or give your vet a call and ask them what routine charges might look like, noting the maximums your insurance company won’t exceed.
For example, if your insurance company will only cover up to $150 of teeth cleaning, but you know teeth cleaning is likely to cost you $600, mark the cost down as $150. Add together all the sums your wellness plan is likely to pay you this year.
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Then consider your wellness premiums—the amount you’ll pay monthly for your wellness package. Multiply the monthly rate by 12 to get the amount you would spend on wellness coverage in a year.
Does the sum of your probable covered wellness expenditures exceed what you’d pay in a year for that coverage?
If yes, then a wellness add-on is a good investment.
If no, skip wellness pet insurance and tackle this one out of pocket.
If you change your mind down the road, many companies will let you add a preventive care package later, likely when you renew your regular accident and illness insurance at the end of the year.
Don’t be disappointed if a wellness add-on isn’t a good deal. We’ve found it’s one of the least developed areas of pet insurance, and we hope to see better offerings from companies in the future.
Pet Insurance Versus Wellness Plans
Our number one tip for pet parents considering adding a wellness plan to your pet insurance: Don’t pick an insurance provider based on their wellness plan.
Start by prioritizing accident and illness insurance. A preventive care or wellness plan might save you a hundred dollars here or there, but a good accident and illness insurance policy can save you thousands and protect you from much more severe financial shocks than routine vet bills.
It’s more important to choose an insurance company based on their main accident and illness plan than their supplementary add-ons. (Need help? Check out our article on The Best Pet Insurance: A Pet Parent’s Guide and compare plans.)
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There is, however, one group of pet parents who might want to give more thought to wellness and preventive pet insurance, and that’s the puppy and kitten crowd. The list of tests, shots, and procedures (think spaying/neutering and microchipping) that a young pet needs is long.
A wellness plan can ease some of the financial stress of those procedures in a pet’s first year. It can be worth the effort to make sure your insurance company’s preventive care package includes the charges you’re likely to incur.
ManyPets, for example, has higher maximums—meaning they’ll pay more money for each covered wellness service—but their standard wellness insurance doesn’t cover spaying/neutering, microchipping, or fecal and blood tests, while the “BestWellness” plan at Pets Best does.
If you’re not sure what kinds of routine care you’re likely to need, give your vet a call. They can sketch out your pet’s routine annual needs (and you can schedule them at the same time).
Whatever you decide, our best advice is do the math, since happily, this is one of the few kinds of insurance where you don’t have to guess.
Further Reading
- The Best Pet Insurance: A Pet Parent’s Guide
- Pet Insurance and Pre-Existing Conditions—What To Know Before You Buy
- How Much Does Pet Insurance Cost, and Is It Worth It?
- What Does Pet Insurance Cover? Everything You Need to Know
- How to Help Your Dog in a Health Emergency
- How to Create an Awesome Pet First Aid Kit: A Step by Step Guide
- Rover’s Guide to Pet Fire Safety
- How to Create an Emergency Preparedness Plan for Your Pets
