Pet insurers, at least in Canada, are just an industry of highway robbery. They deny everything and make you fight up hill for anything. You're usually better off paying a premium into a TFSA or other savings apparatus and be your own insurer.
How is this different from human health providers? They deny everything, and force you to fight them as well. Maybe Canadian health insurance is different, but in the US, it is exactly as you describe pet insurance.
Canadian health insurers haven't been involved in any of the surgeries or pregnancies in my family. Where they were involved: dentists, massages, medications, I've never had any hassle.
Dealing with a pet insurer was eye opening. I can't imagine having to deal with that while a loved one was sick.
Social medicine system paid for it all. For every ultrasound and Obgyn visit we just show our health card. For the birth in a hospital we just show our health card.
Canada has public and private insurance, something like a birth would be covered under public insurance. We just don't think of it as 'insurance' really, since we can't opt out, it comes out of our taxes, and is bought by health Canada rather than a separate plan.
There are also private health insurance plans that cover things not covered by the public insurance, optometrists and dentists fall under that category as do most paramedicals. When Canadians talk about 'health insurance' we're typically referring to the private kind.
There are of course disagreements, but it's the exception rather than the rule. I just two weeks ago went to a specialist and got a prescription, with no questions asked.
Thanks. Yeah it sounds so. I'm glad it's not as dire as some make it sound. But I think that even if this happens 1% of the time, it's awful. I can't imagine having to think about money when dealing with health issues. It was hard enough with a cat.
On the flip side, my wife spends hours per month trying to get RA meds covered. Despite what her MD thinks will work, insurance wants the lowest cost treatment possibilities, regardless of efficacy and (lack of) impact on QOL.
The American health insurance system is broken. Time to toss it out and try something else.
Every insurance company I've had is upfront with their coverage, and covered it just fine. I've never had a major illness like cancer, maybe that is a next level situation that would require legal representation.
The big problem seems to be the soaring prices due to the fight between insurance companies and the hospitals. Depending on who you ask, you get a different opinion on who's fault it is.
Had cancer in the US. Insurance company paid every claim without a peep. That was seven years ago with an effectively curable form of cancer, so I wouldn’t be surprised if things are different now.
Yeah, I have no idea what they're talking about. I'm no fan of the insurance companies, but they can't just deny everything. It's definitely not the predominate experience most people are having with insurance.
Well I know people who take ambulances to the hospital, and have the dr prescribe formula and diapers that way it can be covered by their medicare. But that's a different ballgame than employer insurance. I suppose there's a lot of different kinds of people out there.
They use CareSource to be exact but it provides public health care programs including Medicaid, Medicare, and Marketplace. My wife works with a few people who do these kinds of things. They use ambulances like a personal taxi service. If they can get a dr to say the kid has a rash, they will get "prescribed" a few boxes of special diapers.
You're likely referring to Medicaid, then, not Medicare.
Can't say I'm too fussed about impoverished people getting a few boxes of diapers, and using ambulances for transit reveals an underlying societal problem more than individual greed.
I don't really care as a whole, I'm glad there's a stop gap for the people who would genuinely need this. My complaint is mostly the people I know personally who are doing this. Both families are not broke, and could be doing better if the father actually worked.
The ambulance rides do tie up the system however. I have a cousin who is an EMT and between rescuing overdoses he has regulars they have to taxi because they have a cold, or something else trivial. There is public transportation, but even that would cost them personally and requires waiting. It's probably better to let a few selfish people take advantage of the system in the long run, but it amazes me how selfish some people can be when there's people in real need out there.
What's the maximum cost of a treatment for a dog versus a human? I don't know the pet/human insurance actuarial values, but I'd guess that a person under regular insurance could reasonably build up a savings to cover pet expenses, not so for US healthcare.
You'd be amazed what treatments they'll do on pets. Hip replacements. Chemotherapy. So it could be wildly expensive. But honestly, if we got past a few thousand dollars we'd probably just let our cat go. Heartless, but a budget is critical to the security of the whole family.
People don’t like to talk about it, but this is what almost every family does - people on $30,000 don’t spend a month’s wages on veterinary treatment.
Social media gives us a biased impression, as selling your truck and maxing out your credit cards to pay for your dog’s chemotherapy gets upvoted as a heartwarming feel good story, regardless of the wisdom of doing so.
Pets can get treatments that aren't yet approved for humans - if you've got the budget, there are vets who can do.. whatever.
On the other hand, I had a vet tech friend who said that most people would opt out of treatments that cost more than $200-$300. That's how much they value their pet.
Remember that most of America doesn't have $400 in savings. It's not that they don't value their pets, it quickly becomes "help the dog, or feed my kids"
They deny everything, and force you to fight them as well. Maybe Canadian health insurance is different, but in the US, it is exactly as you describe pet insurance.
Worthless political echo chamber hyperbole and demonstrably false.
Just off the top of my head: Virtually every American with health insurance can get flu shots for free, paid for by their insurance carrier. Ditto for women who want birth control pills (though that is usually a legislative mandate).
A friend works for a small insurance company, and she says it paid over a billion dollars in claims last year for fewer than 50k members.
I have personally seen women struggle to get birth control with health insurance. I have also had to sue medical practitioners in the past for fraudulent billing. I have also seen people be unable to buy life-saving drugs because of an insurance hiccup.
The American health insurance industry is completely fucked if you think it has anything to do with providing healthcare and isn't entirely about maximizing profits for the inner circle. People are literally dying because we have the least efficient health insurance system in the world. And it's designed that way because some people are getting ridiculously wealthy from other people's pain and suffering.
I have personally seen women struggle to get birth control with health insurance.
Then check with your state's attorney general. In many states, insurance companies are required to provide it at no cost. Certainly in the last three states in which I've lived.
If it's not required in your state, then contact your legislators and try to get a law passed.
My wife has had a string of back problems and insurance has denied everything the first time it is sent to them. Every MRI, back injection, physical therapy coverage was denied the first time. Each one, we and the doctor had to fight to get it approved.
For example, the first back injection was denied the first time one the basis that "it was not inhibiting her daily function". The notes from the doctor submitted to insurance specifically said "the pain in her back is inhibiting normal daily function." They reject it just to see who will fight back. Furthermore, insurance is only required to look at notes from appointments and will ignore comments from doctors if they aren't tied to anything. So in order to fight an insurance claim requires another appointment with the doctor which costs more money just to get the insurance company to look at the claim again and get it approved.
> Just off the top of my head: Virtually every American with health insurance can get flu shots for free, paid for by their insurance carrier. Ditto for women who want birth control pills (though that is usually a legislative mandate).
These tend to make financial sense for insurers - flu shots are cheap and a lot cheaper than hospitalizations, same thing for avoiding pregnancy... and even then, both were explicitly made free via the ACA, not the kindness of health insurers.
These aren't the sorts of claims insurers kick up a fuss over.
Canadian health insurance is dramatically different. My provincial health card covers pretty much everything except drugs, dental, and optometry. Many drugs are partially covered too and have a small patient co-pay. Drugs in hospital are covered 100% as far as I know (I’ve been in the hospital a few times and have never gotten a bill for anything).
The last few times I can think of paying for anything other than glasses/contacts:
- $40 for a doctor visit and x-ray when I sprained my wrist and had forgotten to renew my health card. Reimbursed when I did renew.
- $25 for a month supply of bupropion (Zyban) for quitting smoking
- $9 for a bottle of Tylenol-3 after my knee surgery (completely covered otherwise)
Things that have been covered 100%:
- stitches when I got kicked in the head while tubing behind a boat
- stitches when I sliced my finger open with a knife (stupid kid stuff)
- appendectomy
- knee surgery #1 - meniscus cartilage tear when I was a kid, didn’t start acting up until my 20s. This included an MRI, a consult with a sports medicine surgeon, and the surgery
- knee surgery #2 - same knee, tore it up again 5 years later while skiing. Only cost here was optional physiotherapy afterwards, at $50/session.
Let me put this in perspective: I'm 28 years old, lived in 3 different countries, two of them in Europe and one of them in America. I've never paid out-of-pocket for health care in my life. I've broken bones, had anaesthesia surgery, 4 teeth removed, dental care, cleanings, hospital stays, I've had a kid 3 months ago (everything pregnancy-related, post-partum clinic), skin care, optician, dietician, psychiatrist, etc etc etc...
The concept itself of fighting either my health-care provider or my (state-mandated) health insurance to get coverage is completely foreign to me and I'm only familiar with it thru the Internet by reading what people from the USA write.
The difference is that human health "insurance" is de-facto mandatory due to rampant price inflation as well as continual lobbying to increase their moat, whereas pet care costs haven't quite spiraled out of control yet so we can easily reject the scam.
Overextending yourself, glossing it over with an extended warranty, and abdicating your pet's health to corporate cost-optimization is not a nice thing to do. The hard-to-hear responsible thing is to not get a pet until you're in the financial position to take care of them!
Let us hope this whole idea of "pet insurance" will be history in several years, rather than it succeeding in turning the veterinary industry into an overfinancialized clusterfuck like human healthcare.
I live in Canada and never had this problem. The only frustrating part is they take a long time to process and not ideal for people who live pay cheque to pay cheque
The quite huge industry and services around pets (insurance, vet, healthcare, beauty, food, ..) and pets themselves are significantly damaging the environment:
Even the one mentioning that pets eat 1/5th of the worlds meat and fish production? or have an environmental footprint equivalent to 2 4x4 cars? (in the reference)
I agree with you, but it's kind of like pointing out how much destruction and suffering is involved with our factory-farming of meat: Nobody wants to hear it right now. Try back in 50 years.
I think the issue is at least partially a failure to present an alternative vision.
People do the things they do and consume the things they do in order to meet some need (stimulation, entertainment, pleasure, etc.). Although, I don't think it's unreasonable to advocate for some austerity, to a significant degree people are going to need alternatives that meet the needs that were formerly met by the things they are giving up.
It seems to me that environmentalists tend to fail to provide a vision for what those alternatives could be.
We may need to reconsider what is austerity also, is living without a pet austerity? is washing ourselves with a soap bar instead of a multitude of cosmetic products and stuff austerity? is eating local legumes/fruits austerity? is using a bike to commute or go shopping austerity? etc.. There are many environmental-friendly alternatives, I think it's every person's role to find those alternatives (politics are more interested to foster consumerism), this guy is quite inspirational https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX4kq4QfYRA
That car fact is in a quote by a guy with a company selling a meatless pet food alternative. I’m going to need an valid source, not a financially motivated comment to a journalist.
Your other links don’t hold up much better. The cat ones advocate for keeping domesticated cats indoors. The dog article isn’t about pets either, but roaming packs of strays. I doubt you have to try very hard to convince anyone that stray dogs are a problem.
Pets eat 1/5th of the world meat and fish production, do you want sources for that (easy to google)? Do you understand this fact alone show how large their environmental impact is? Do you still see an evil conspiracy behind those facts, and why?
This tiny sentience (alone in the universe as far as we know) has been given the fantastic wealth of a little planet. Of course we should spend it wisely.
But the only thing more pathetic that a spendthrift foolishly wasting their inheritance is a miser making themselves miserable grasping at every cent.
They sell fuel having prepared it for burning, put it in tankers, and sent it to sites that pour it into the machines that burn it. Ergo they are responsible for its impacts, and should be taxed, regulated and penalised accordingly. The entire environmental impact should be on the producer and seller, and fully priced into their sales. Customers would then be incentivised to find a more economic, and less impactful fuel.
there are fuel companies because there are billion people in their cars, of course it's something to tackle as well, I don't own a car personally
But a pet is equivalent to 2 4x4 cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_food#cite_note-8 so it can't hurt to start with that, or with anything else that would reduce pollution basically, at any scale. The problem is the accumulation, if most people reduce their environmental footprint by a half, the effect is very significant, it's like twice less humans
Everything that people own has some carbon cost associated with is, so the mere presence of a carbon cost doesn't justify getting rid of it.
Why would you argue that pets specifically are something that people should give up? People have needs that go beyond food, water, and shelter (e.g. play, love, stimulation, etc.) that will have to be factored into any plan to reduce carbon emissions. It seems to me that pets are an excellent value in terms of degree to which they provide for their needs versus associated carbon cost.
Yes we have needs, but the planet has limits that we already hit, so we now should all have a moral duty to limit/filter our non-essential needs
The sources show how significant pets impact is (1/5th of the world meat+fish production, think about the processing, transport, and all intermediate materials required for this and the pollution that generates, and finally the ecosystem damages via outdoors and feral ones)
I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure that the needs that pets supply are non-essential. For many people they are a significant, if not primary, source of companionship and joy. I think we would need a plan for how to offset removing something so important.
First, if you actually want to make an impact here, you shouldn't start off by antagonizing the people you're ostensibly trying to reach. As it stands, your message is probably most helpful to pet industries, since it allows pet owners to dismiss good arguments about the environmental objections to pet ownership by painting them with the anger your post evokes.
So here are some details, if you're interested... your post irrelevant to the topic. You're conflating issues of feral animals with pets. Of course these are related, but you need to work through that if you want to make a cogent point. Using phrases like "like blindly their toy pets" undermines anything else you might say. It hurts any chance you have to make a sincere point since it's indistinguishable from trolling.
Maybe it's just your method of presentation is taboo. And maybe you feed into your feelings of self-righteousness about your crusade(s) by intentionally evoking negative reactions from those you are trying to influence.
Honestly it's unintentional, I don't really understand the negative reactions. What I've wrote are not maybe's, it's facts about one of the ways to relieve the environment. It's just my sincere immediate reaction about "Pets insurances", it makes absolutely no sense to me in our environmental context. I can take as many downvotes as people want, but I just hope to at trigger a questioning, not hate
So I looked at one. Brazil has an estimated population of one billion feral dogs according to the WaPo link. A number I find very difficult to believe, yet, if you have a billion of anything the size of a dog, it's pretty much guaranteed to be destructive, no? e.g. rabbits in Australia.
That's quite a bit removed from pets in countries that control strays, have dog wardens and such. Dogs need no commercial pet food, mainly waste from the huge industrial food globals today -- they will almost certainly do better on traditional feeds -- leftovers, bones, etc, without added oils, colour and sugars.
We are the environment, we're part of it, we're also the solution if we want to be. A better place to start might be to try and figure out how to control a feral dog population of a billion...
There are probably around 1 billion domestic pets overall, since there are close to 8 billion individuals, mostly from developed countries, where the culture is sadly to have pets
I don't know about the population of feral 'pets', it can makes sense that it's even larger
Anyway both are significantly damaging for different reasons (feral: ecosystem damages and native species reduction, domestic: they are part of the (over)consumerism system, so they virtually increase the human population)
How to cut down both of them? first starting with domestic pets which is the source of the problem, over-consumerism in general
From a fast skim of Wikipedia that estimate seems to be overstating it by 2-4x
There are going to be a dozen more urgent sources of emissions, environmental damage etc before we start restricting pets. Humans in the developed world are emitting vastly more than their pet -- first discourage the humans over breeding, outlaw religious edicts that make a stand against common sense contraception, etc. Constrain fossil fuel use, consumerism, capitalism.
Thus far it looks like there is little to no chance of any of that happening, so a campaign about pets, carrier bags or drinking straws is rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
Same thing can and should be said for toy humans. Or any hobby you have. Or anything you choose to do with this life.
I eat meat, fly often, race cars, like taking long roadtrips, own an SUV, and have 2 cats.
But I also reuse, recycle, use a tankless hot water heater, carpool in an EV, have solar on my roof, don't have A/C at home, live in a temperate climate, and don't have any toy humans.
Our family dental plan is the cost of about 10 cleanings a year, so it’s not a great deal, but we exceed that number and have also used the reduced fee for fillings a few times.
Dental’s historic lack of insurance and relative ease of opening a clinic has obviously made it much more cost-competitive than medical care, so we kind of feel like we are contributing to a future problem by using dental insurance, but it’s hard to turn down the savings now.
>...so we kind of feel like we are contributing to a future problem by using dental insurance, but it’s hard to turn down the savings now.
I agree. It feels awful to make a rational choice in your best interest and to see the mess it can cause at scale. The reason health insurance is such a mess in the US was from a tit-for-tat battle of people operating in a rational way (providers, insurance companies, and drug companies).
Insurance companies have pre-negotiated rates for everything. I didn't like paying for my dental insurance, and asked my dentist what the cost would be for 2 cleanings/year with no insurance. Something like $120/cleaning and another $75 for x-rays periodically. No cash discount because they'd run into legal issues by offering a better rate for non-insured patients.
My insurance is around $10/month. Since I get my teeth cleaned 2x/year, the rational choice is to buy my insurance and realize I breakeven after the first cleaning. But it feels bad. If my dentist is getting $40/cleaning through insurance, I'd rather be able to pay him $45/cleaning and keep insurance out of it all.
If the dentist is getting $40/cleaning from insurance, why couldn't he bill a cash patient $50 for it and have everyone (but the insurance company) come out ahead?
Maybe my mistake was acknowledging I have insurance. The billing person said they run into issues with the insurance company if they let covered individuals bypass the insurance.
This blog post describes some of the mechanics in a bit more detail.
What I don't understand is when teeth became luxury bones and seeing things became a nice to have. Why again are seeing and eating not considered part of health insurance?
In the US, it's just a way for employers to offer tax free income to employees.
And nowadays, it's morphed into a crazy scheme where large Dental Service Organizations (DSO) offer super cheap cleanings to the insurance, and then treat their dentists and hygienists like sales staff who try to push bullshit like fluoride treatments and sealants with 1,000% markups that you have to pay for out of pocket.
It's crazy what the situation is, I stopped going to certain dental practices and had to find an independent one I could trust. I'd almost rather forego the employer provided insurance cleanings and pay cash just to makes sure the incentives are aligned and the dentists and hygienists aren't trying to scam me.
Would you like to pay $20 for a protection plan on your new foot massager?
What makes me the most upset about these little games of chance companies want us to play, is how it takes advantage of certain demographics, like the elderly.
Yeah, it used to be just for televisions or other big purchases. But they're making so much money off of these things, it's creeping into smaller and smaller purchases. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who don't understand upselling, they're just excited about their new toothbrush.
It really feels predatory when they do it on consumables. I hope I'm never offered it again on a consumable.
I was shocked by the 15% premium! I could self insure and break even if 1/6 products were defective.
Televisions will be around for years. The 3 toothbrush heads should last under a year. How are they going to break? I'm sure the manufacturer would give me a coupon for a free head if something was wrong, and it'd take about the same amount of time as finding the receipt, driving to, and doing a return at Walmart.
You don't need to do any calculations to figure out if insurance on low value items is a bad deal for you. The insurance company has already done the sums. It is a bad deal for you.
You should never insure anything you can afford to replace yourself.
Only if all the other costs you incur while getting that thing replaced are smaller than you would by using said insurance to address it. Sometimes the cost you suffer when something breaks is not the same as the price of that thing.
Oh I know that. I've been reducing my insurance as my financial position has improved. I think almost nobody on this forum would buy insurance on low value items, as the math and straightforward probabilities explain themselves.
But there are many people who don't understand the math or theory of insurance. And those people often have less overall education and earning potential. And those people are getting swindled hard.
Yes, I think that was my original point. If I get duped, then it doesn't hurt me that much. But there's a lot of people who are on fixed incomes, or just not that bright, and this hurts them.
> But there are many people who don't understand the math or theory of insurance. And those people often have less overall education and earning potential. And those people are getting swindled hard.
I find that most people have such an emotional loss aversion, that there is no point to explaining the math or the simple concept of only insuring losses that you can’t afford.
You can even try to show them that if the grocery store offered insurance for a cucumber, would they buy it? And they will say no, and if you ask why, it’s because they can buy another cucumber for not much money.
But then they will turn around and buy insurance for a TV that costs a few hundred dollars, even though they can very well afford a new TV.
So I stopped seeing it as people getting swindled. What I see as having negative utility, they percent as positive utility due to the emotional comfort it provides.
I looked into health insurance for my cat a few months ago. The quoted premium was more than what I and my employer pay to cover my entire family of humans. And this was for a single four-year-old spayed cat with no history of health problems.
Some companies in the UK offer health insurance for private healthcare. The main advantage of private being you can get appointments much faster. I'm not really sure what the relative pricing is for private healthcare in the UK vs the states, so it might be the insurance costs reflect that.
Canadian employers offer health insurance to cover things like dental, vision and drugs, which are only covered to varying degrees by provincial health plans. They'll also cover massage therapists, counselors, etc.
Those plans cost in the hundreds of dollars, vs the US plans which cost in the thousands.
American. And to other responders, I'll restate that the premium for the cat totaled more than the amount my employer pays for insurance, plus the amount that's taken out of my check.
I know a lot of people don't know exactly how much their employer pays, but mine provides a yearly printout of what it costs them, and we got ours just a couple of weeks ago, so the number was fresh in my mind.
Moral: Read the fine print. Especially on insurance plans. Expect loopholes, and if you don't find them, read it again, more carefully. Yes, it can be a lot of work. You might end up not buying just because you can't understand it. But if you go in expecting the insurer to pay out on the basis of what you think is "reasonable", you're not going to do due diligence. Expect each claim to be adversarial, so you can be pleasantly surprised by the exceptions.
revel moped rentals have an insurance plan that's dependent on compliance with their entire rental agreement, including maintaining a safe driving record. seems like a catch 22.
4.01 'Revel provides third party auto liability coverage ... if the Member complies ... with all terms and conditions of this Agreement'
2.06 'maintain a safe driving record during the entire Term'
consumers have been generally willing to sign long contracts without reading them but small businesses with legal resources are going to start getting burned by their vendors and insisting on shorter, simpler, fairer contracts (I hope). These contracts are pure slime.
Our vet advised us against buying insurance. He said that in his experience, the policies tend to exclude a given dog breed's common maladies. So, for example, if your German Shepard ever got hip displasia, it wouldn't be covered.
We had Buster, the GSD, for 13 years and over the course of that time his vet treatments cost a fair amount in addition to normal stuff
* Root canal (he broke a fang chewing a rock)
* 2x surgery for ACLs in both hind legs
* surgery to remove carcinoma on his jaw
* prednisone shots for arthritis
That probably comes to something around $10K over those 13 years. But really, it's not that different from what we'd have been paying in premiums anyway.
I have a standard poodle and the breed is particularly susceptible to GDV (Gastric Dilatation-Volvulus).
My dog got it suddenly at around 1.5 years old and our insurance paid out for the full emergency surgery (about 5k) with no issues; as with any providers the details are what matter.
My pet insurance has been very good about covering most issues. It's marketed by the ASPCA, provided by www.cfpetinsurance.com. I've been very happy with their service.
The sad reality is that similar shenanigans are employed by health insurance companies in the US. Every year millions of claims are denied for frivolous reasons by health insurance companies and often times, the denier is a person with no or very little medical knowledge compared to their doctor. Just that there are human lives instead of pet lives on the line.
> the denier is a person with no or very little medical knowledge compared to their doctor.
This is not true. There are teams of MDs and PharmDs that evaluate what treatment options are effective and are backed up with data, and they create the criteria with which to determine what is appropriate or not based on the persons medical history and chart notes. Also, employers and governments often provide insurance (or better named managed care organizations - MCO) companies with the criteria of what they want to pay for, so many times it’s not even up to the MCOs themselves.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 2560 ms ] threadCanadian health insurers haven't been involved in any of the surgeries or pregnancies in my family. Where they were involved: dentists, massages, medications, I've never had any hassle.
Dealing with a pet insurer was eye opening. I can't imagine having to deal with that while a loved one was sick.
There are also private health insurance plans that cover things not covered by the public insurance, optometrists and dentists fall under that category as do most paramedicals. When Canadians talk about 'health insurance' we're typically referring to the private kind.
The GP post is exaggerating quite a lot.
There are of course disagreements, but it's the exception rather than the rule. I just two weeks ago went to a specialist and got a prescription, with no questions asked.
The American health insurance system is broken. Time to toss it out and try something else.
The big problem seems to be the soaring prices due to the fight between insurance companies and the hospitals. Depending on who you ask, you get a different opinion on who's fault it is.
Costs for various treatments are already negotiated ahead of time and hospitals/doctors bill insurers directly.
If the insurer thinks you received some kind of treatment you shouldn't have, it's between them and the hospital/doctor.
Of course there's always the odd/fancy treatment people insist on getting that is not covered. In that case you'll be billed by the hospital.
In neither case you'll be fighting any insurance company personally.
Can't say I'm too fussed about impoverished people getting a few boxes of diapers, and using ambulances for transit reveals an underlying societal problem more than individual greed.
If people are willing to go through that much trouble just to get from A to B or to save a few dollars on diapers, there's something wrong.
They're investing hours and go through quite a hassle just to possibly save single digit amounts of dollars.
You don't do this if you don't think you have to.
The ambulance rides do tie up the system however. I have a cousin who is an EMT and between rescuing overdoses he has regulars they have to taxi because they have a cold, or something else trivial. There is public transportation, but even that would cost them personally and requires waiting. It's probably better to let a few selfish people take advantage of the system in the long run, but it amazes me how selfish some people can be when there's people in real need out there.
Social media gives us a biased impression, as selling your truck and maxing out your credit cards to pay for your dog’s chemotherapy gets upvoted as a heartwarming feel good story, regardless of the wisdom of doing so.
On the other hand, I had a vet tech friend who said that most people would opt out of treatments that cost more than $200-$300. That's how much they value their pet.
Worthless political echo chamber hyperbole and demonstrably false.
Just off the top of my head: Virtually every American with health insurance can get flu shots for free, paid for by their insurance carrier. Ditto for women who want birth control pills (though that is usually a legislative mandate).
A friend works for a small insurance company, and she says it paid over a billion dollars in claims last year for fewer than 50k members.
The American health insurance industry is completely fucked if you think it has anything to do with providing healthcare and isn't entirely about maximizing profits for the inner circle. People are literally dying because we have the least efficient health insurance system in the world. And it's designed that way because some people are getting ridiculously wealthy from other people's pain and suffering.
Then check with your state's attorney general. In many states, insurance companies are required to provide it at no cost. Certainly in the last three states in which I've lived.
If it's not required in your state, then contact your legislators and try to get a law passed.
For example, the first back injection was denied the first time one the basis that "it was not inhibiting her daily function". The notes from the doctor submitted to insurance specifically said "the pain in her back is inhibiting normal daily function." They reject it just to see who will fight back. Furthermore, insurance is only required to look at notes from appointments and will ignore comments from doctors if they aren't tied to anything. So in order to fight an insurance claim requires another appointment with the doctor which costs more money just to get the insurance company to look at the claim again and get it approved.
It's a terrible game.
These tend to make financial sense for insurers - flu shots are cheap and a lot cheaper than hospitalizations, same thing for avoiding pregnancy... and even then, both were explicitly made free via the ACA, not the kindness of health insurers.
These aren't the sorts of claims insurers kick up a fuss over.
The last few times I can think of paying for anything other than glasses/contacts:
- $40 for a doctor visit and x-ray when I sprained my wrist and had forgotten to renew my health card. Reimbursed when I did renew.
- $25 for a month supply of bupropion (Zyban) for quitting smoking
- $9 for a bottle of Tylenol-3 after my knee surgery (completely covered otherwise)
Things that have been covered 100%:
- stitches when I got kicked in the head while tubing behind a boat
- stitches when I sliced my finger open with a knife (stupid kid stuff)
- appendectomy
- knee surgery #1 - meniscus cartilage tear when I was a kid, didn’t start acting up until my 20s. This included an MRI, a consult with a sports medicine surgeon, and the surgery
- knee surgery #2 - same knee, tore it up again 5 years later while skiing. Only cost here was optional physiotherapy afterwards, at $50/session.
The concept itself of fighting either my health-care provider or my (state-mandated) health insurance to get coverage is completely foreign to me and I'm only familiar with it thru the Internet by reading what people from the USA write.
Overextending yourself, glossing it over with an extended warranty, and abdicating your pet's health to corporate cost-optimization is not a nice thing to do. The hard-to-hear responsible thing is to not get a pet until you're in the financial position to take care of them!
Let us hope this whole idea of "pet insurance" will be history in several years, rather than it succeeding in turning the veterinary industry into an overfinancialized clusterfuck like human healthcare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_food#Impact -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/the-dog-is... -- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/moral-cost-of-... -- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/feral-cats-kil...
Please think about it, share and act
edit: I know this usually gets downvoted because like blindly their toy pets, but it feels like a duty nowadays to remind it
People do the things they do and consume the things they do in order to meet some need (stimulation, entertainment, pleasure, etc.). Although, I don't think it's unreasonable to advocate for some austerity, to a significant degree people are going to need alternatives that meet the needs that were formerly met by the things they are giving up.
It seems to me that environmentalists tend to fail to provide a vision for what those alternatives could be.
Your other links don’t hold up much better. The cat ones advocate for keeping domesticated cats indoors. The dog article isn’t about pets either, but roaming packs of strays. I doubt you have to try very hard to convince anyone that stray dogs are a problem.
But the only thing more pathetic that a spendthrift foolishly wasting their inheritance is a miser making themselves miserable grasping at every cent.
[1]: https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1...
But a pet is equivalent to 2 4x4 cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_food#cite_note-8 so it can't hurt to start with that, or with anything else that would reduce pollution basically, at any scale. The problem is the accumulation, if most people reduce their environmental footprint by a half, the effect is very significant, it's like twice less humans
Why would you argue that pets specifically are something that people should give up? People have needs that go beyond food, water, and shelter (e.g. play, love, stimulation, etc.) that will have to be factored into any plan to reduce carbon emissions. It seems to me that pets are an excellent value in terms of degree to which they provide for their needs versus associated carbon cost.
The sources show how significant pets impact is (1/5th of the world meat+fish production, think about the processing, transport, and all intermediate materials required for this and the pollution that generates, and finally the ecosystem damages via outdoors and feral ones)
First, if you actually want to make an impact here, you shouldn't start off by antagonizing the people you're ostensibly trying to reach. As it stands, your message is probably most helpful to pet industries, since it allows pet owners to dismiss good arguments about the environmental objections to pet ownership by painting them with the anger your post evokes.
So here are some details, if you're interested... your post irrelevant to the topic. You're conflating issues of feral animals with pets. Of course these are related, but you need to work through that if you want to make a cogent point. Using phrases like "like blindly their toy pets" undermines anything else you might say. It hurts any chance you have to make a sincere point since it's indistinguishable from trolling.
That's quite a bit removed from pets in countries that control strays, have dog wardens and such. Dogs need no commercial pet food, mainly waste from the huge industrial food globals today -- they will almost certainly do better on traditional feeds -- leftovers, bones, etc, without added oils, colour and sugars.
We are the environment, we're part of it, we're also the solution if we want to be. A better place to start might be to try and figure out how to control a feral dog population of a billion...
I don't know about the population of feral 'pets', it can makes sense that it's even larger
Anyway both are significantly damaging for different reasons (feral: ecosystem damages and native species reduction, domestic: they are part of the (over)consumerism system, so they virtually increase the human population)
How to cut down both of them? first starting with domestic pets which is the source of the problem, over-consumerism in general
There are going to be a dozen more urgent sources of emissions, environmental damage etc before we start restricting pets. Humans in the developed world are emitting vastly more than their pet -- first discourage the humans over breeding, outlaw religious edicts that make a stand against common sense contraception, etc. Constrain fossil fuel use, consumerism, capitalism.
Thus far it looks like there is little to no chance of any of that happening, so a campaign about pets, carrier bags or drinking straws is rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.
I eat meat, fly often, race cars, like taking long roadtrips, own an SUV, and have 2 cats.
But I also reuse, recycle, use a tankless hot water heater, carpool in an EV, have solar on my roof, don't have A/C at home, live in a temperate climate, and don't have any toy humans.
Dental’s historic lack of insurance and relative ease of opening a clinic has obviously made it much more cost-competitive than medical care, so we kind of feel like we are contributing to a future problem by using dental insurance, but it’s hard to turn down the savings now.
I agree. It feels awful to make a rational choice in your best interest and to see the mess it can cause at scale. The reason health insurance is such a mess in the US was from a tit-for-tat battle of people operating in a rational way (providers, insurance companies, and drug companies).
Insurance companies have pre-negotiated rates for everything. I didn't like paying for my dental insurance, and asked my dentist what the cost would be for 2 cleanings/year with no insurance. Something like $120/cleaning and another $75 for x-rays periodically. No cash discount because they'd run into legal issues by offering a better rate for non-insured patients.
My insurance is around $10/month. Since I get my teeth cleaned 2x/year, the rational choice is to buy my insurance and realize I breakeven after the first cleaning. But it feels bad. If my dentist is getting $40/cleaning through insurance, I'd rather be able to pay him $45/cleaning and keep insurance out of it all.
This blog post describes some of the mechanics in a bit more detail.
http://selfpaypatient.com/2014/01/03/insured-patients-can-sa...
At the end of the day, it’s just a marketing plan for the covered dentists.
And nowadays, it's morphed into a crazy scheme where large Dental Service Organizations (DSO) offer super cheap cleanings to the insurance, and then treat their dentists and hygienists like sales staff who try to push bullshit like fluoride treatments and sealants with 1,000% markups that you have to pay for out of pocket.
It's crazy what the situation is, I stopped going to certain dental practices and had to find an independent one I could trust. I'd almost rather forego the employer provided insurance cleanings and pay cash just to makes sure the incentives are aligned and the dentists and hygienists aren't trying to scam me.
What makes me the most upset about these little games of chance companies want us to play, is how it takes advantage of certain demographics, like the elderly.
That offer really caught me off guard.
I was shocked by the 15% premium! I could self insure and break even if 1/6 products were defective.
Televisions will be around for years. The 3 toothbrush heads should last under a year. How are they going to break? I'm sure the manufacturer would give me a coupon for a free head if something was wrong, and it'd take about the same amount of time as finding the receipt, driving to, and doing a return at Walmart.
You should never insure anything you can afford to replace yourself.
But there are many people who don't understand the math or theory of insurance. And those people often have less overall education and earning potential. And those people are getting swindled hard.
I find that most people have such an emotional loss aversion, that there is no point to explaining the math or the simple concept of only insuring losses that you can’t afford.
You can even try to show them that if the grocery store offered insurance for a cucumber, would they buy it? And they will say no, and if you ask why, it’s because they can buy another cucumber for not much money.
But then they will turn around and buy insurance for a TV that costs a few hundred dollars, even though they can very well afford a new TV.
So I stopped seeing it as people getting swindled. What I see as having negative utility, they percent as positive utility due to the emotional comfort it provides.
This is true if you are an average person. If you know yourself to be a higher-risk, it could be a good deal.
Care to share more? What was the premium for the cat? Are you American?
Those plans cost in the hundreds of dollars, vs the US plans which cost in the thousands.
I know a lot of people don't know exactly how much their employer pays, but mine provides a yearly printout of what it costs them, and we got ours just a couple of weeks ago, so the number was fresh in my mind.
4.01 'Revel provides third party auto liability coverage ... if the Member complies ... with all terms and conditions of this Agreement'
2.06 'maintain a safe driving record during the entire Term'
https://gorevel.com/rental-agreement/
consumers have been generally willing to sign long contracts without reading them but small businesses with legal resources are going to start getting burned by their vendors and insisting on shorter, simpler, fairer contracts (I hope). These contracts are pure slime.
The insurance policy doesn't cover running, jumping, playing... Things that any healthy dog do. But they also don't cover "preexisting conditions".
So... if your dog doesn't play, he is unhealthy and therefore he isn't covered.
We had Buster, the GSD, for 13 years and over the course of that time his vet treatments cost a fair amount in addition to normal stuff
* Root canal (he broke a fang chewing a rock)
* 2x surgery for ACLs in both hind legs
* surgery to remove carcinoma on his jaw
* prednisone shots for arthritis
That probably comes to something around $10K over those 13 years. But really, it's not that different from what we'd have been paying in premiums anyway.
My dog got it suddenly at around 1.5 years old and our insurance paid out for the full emergency surgery (about 5k) with no issues; as with any providers the details are what matter.
This is not true. There are teams of MDs and PharmDs that evaluate what treatment options are effective and are backed up with data, and they create the criteria with which to determine what is appropriate or not based on the persons medical history and chart notes. Also, employers and governments often provide insurance (or better named managed care organizations - MCO) companies with the criteria of what they want to pay for, so many times it’s not even up to the MCOs themselves.