Is Pet Dental Insurance Worth It?

Good afternoon, guys. My name is Dr. Lara here at Heron Lakes Animal Hospital. Today I'm going to be doing a follow up video on pet insurance. And so there are a lot of ins and outs on pet insurance. And one of those ins and outs is dental coverage. And so some of the pet insurance companies will cover periodontal disease. Periodontal disease is one of the biggest diseases that you're going to see in your pet's mouths. It is also one of the most frequent diseases, if not probably the most common disease that we will see in veterinary medicine. Okay. That is a result of we as a veterinary field doing a poor job of educating clients about periodontal disease, also educating our actual veterinary students, and also the fact that we do a poor job of educating clients about the importance of daily dental hygiene. Okay? So whenever you go ahead and you look at getting pet insurance for your dogs, one of the factors you have to realize is does my dog get a higher likelihood of having periodontalism? Typically those are going to be your smaller breed dogs. So I would say things like miniature, anything that has miniature in it, or toy or teacup, those breeds are more likely. So schnauzers, miniature poodles, any sort of Chihuahuas, Yorkies, those kinds of breeds are anything like £20 and less are going to be more prone to periodontal disease than these medium to large breed dogs. Cats are not as prone to periodontal disease. They're more prone to something called resorptive lesions. That's for another video. Okay, so if you guys have questions about that, there'll be a link in our video probably in a few weeks talking to you about resorptive lesions. So the different insurances as of right now, the ones that I'm familiar with, if you have dental tartar on your dog mouth or your cat's mouth, the insurance. Before signing up for your insurance policy, periodontal disease is going to be an automatic. The insurance company is going to assume that your pet has periodontal disease. So if you take your pet in for a cleaning and your vet finds that they have periodontal disease, that is going to be considered pre existing, which means the insurance company is not going to cover it. So each insurance company has their own rules on how you lift the pre existing condition of periodontal disease. Trupanion will typically require a non anesthetic scaling and polishing. They do not require any sort of sedation. That's a great thing about trupanion is that to lift any sort of periodontal disease, you only. They only require a non sedate scaling and polishing. Embrace requires a either non sedate or sedate. It just depends on your vet's recommendations. Okay. ASPCA requires general anesthesia for the scaling and polishing. To have it lifted as a pre existing condition nationwide requires sedation. And so it can potentially be not general anesthesia but a sedated scaling and polishing. And so this is something that is very important for you to know if you're hoping that your pet insurance will cover your periodontal disease for your pet. If you don't know this, you may end up with a big bill and think that the insurance doesn't cover it and then they don't. And that's happened to me where I thought it did cover it for a patient and it didn't. And that was something that I had to take on the chin and learn as a business owner and as a veterinarian working with insurance companies. Okay, if you guys have any questions about this particular topic, please let me know. Those are the insurance companies that I am familiar with what their policies are on getting the periodontal disease lifted as a pre existing condition. Any other questions? Thanks for watching. If you found this helpful, give us a thumbs up. Share it with somebody else who you think might need it and subscribe because there'll be other things that we'll want that we'll have on here that you may want. So have a great day.