Insuring Your Bearded Dragon With Pet Insurance

[Homebody]

This is a Reptiles magazine article on the benefits of exotic pet insurance (https://reptilesmagazine.com/insurin...pet-insurance/). I thought the article was well written and persuasive. Not persuasive enough for me to insure my Children's python, but, if I kept a species likely to require regular vet care, I would reconsider.

[Malum Argenteum]

Hmm.

Asymptomatic pinworms are not necessarily worth treating (example source, but pretty common knowledge). A high level, though, can indicate poor husbandry (pinworms have a direct life cycle, and will build up if the animal is reingesting feces either directly or through feeders). At any rate, a dose of Panacur is like $15 at a vet.

Nationwide makes you call for a quote, but the website says that exotic plans for illness care "generally starts at less than $21/mo." (Note that their dog and cat policies are available only in 30% and 50% deductible options; not sure for reptiles. Also, "Wellness coverage is not available for exotic pets at this time.").

Anyway, say it is $20 a month and covers all illness-related care. If a beardie lives ten years, that's $2,400. It would be an unusual bearded dragon that would require $2,400 in illness-related medical care. Much more financially prudent would be to put $20 a month in a mason jar and keep the beardie healthy, and then when the beardie dies healthy at a ripe old age you celebrate its life with a Caribbean cruise. Get another bearded dragon now so you can take a friend on the cruise.

[Bogertophis]

Insurance companies HOPE you won't give it so much logical thought as Malum Argenteum just did- I'll take the "jar" approach any day, thanks.

[Homebody]

Nationwide makes you call for a quote, but the website says that exotic plans for illness care "generally starts at less than $21/mo." (Note that their dog and cat policies are available only in 30% and 50% deductible options; not sure for reptiles. Also, "Wellness coverage is not available for exotic pets at this time.").

Anyway, say it is $20 a month and covers all illness-related care. If a beardie lives ten years, that's $2,400. It would be an unusual bearded dragon that would require $2,400 in illness-related medical care. Much more financially prudent would be to put $20 a month in a mason jar and keep the beardie healthy, and then when the beardie dies healthy at a ripe old age you celebrate its life with a Caribbean cruise. Get another bearded dragon now so you can take a friend on the cruise.

I don't doubt it. If, on the other hand, you're one of the people unable to resist spending a mason jar full of money, then purchasing insurance might be the best thing you can do for your pet.

[Malum Argenteum]

There's certainly considerations of whether herp health and outcomes are more affected by vet care or by husbandry, and that would inform on what the best thing to do for your pet is. Personally, I'd wager that fish tanks and ExoTerras kill more BPs than a lack of vet access does, and also that buying non-established feeders is right up there as well. The handful of herps that I produced that sellers reported back about their deaths were almost all due to egregiously inappropriate housing (one was a mystery death after about six months at about 1.5 years of age, which at any rate wasn't amenable to vet care since it was healthy until it was dead).

But I'm not sure the insurance is the best bet even for the vet care. Running up more than $1000 with one animal in one year at the vet is not impossible (though I've not done it yet, and I have ~30 long term residents and a couple hundred seasonal and quite a few not-really-vet-treatable herps), but at some point a person has to consider whether it makes sense to pay so much to fix up an animal (a lot will depend on the chances of recovery, anticipated quality of life, and how old the animal is already, but heroic measures for herps are maybe sometimes unwarranted). Anyway, $1000 on a credit card at 18% interest, paid off at $20 a month, would cost $1,862 over a little less than 8 years to pay off. So, putting that particular hypothetical bill on a CC is a better deal even if the $1000 expense becomes necessary, and a lot better deal if, like most herps, they never end up getting illness care from a vet. When using a CC at the minimum monthly payment looks like the best option, that's really saying something.

[Homebody]

Anyway, $1000 on a credit card at 18% interest, paid off at $20 a month, would cost $1,862 over a little less than 8 years to pay off. So, putting that particular hypothetical bill on a CC is a better deal even if the $1000 expense becomes necessary, and a lot better deal if, like most herps, they never end up getting illness care from a vet. When using a CC at the minimum monthly payment looks like the best option, that's really saying something.

I might not be able to resist spending a mason jar of money, but I know I can put a large vet bill on my credit card, because I have. Glad to hear that wasn't the dumbest thing I could have done.

[bcr229]

Running up more than $1000 with one animal in one year at the vet is not impossible...

For smaller reptiles, probably not. For retics and burms that need more vet techs to help hold the critter + more meds because of their body weight it's very possible to run up that bill in one visit, but then I'd expect their health insurance premiums to be proportionally higher as well.

[Malum Argenteum]

Good points. There are also herps that have such a high market value (or breeding value, or are simply uber-rare in captivity) that throwing money at their vet care makes more sense than for the average bearded dragon. I would hope keepers of those animals would have accounted for these costs without need for insurance, but I wouldn't be surprised to see counterexamples.

It is weird that reptiles are a luxury item that attract a lot of people who aren't remotely financially set to keep them. My most recent case was someone who bought a rosy boa from me ($375 with shipping) and let me know 8 weeks later that the snake wasn't eating because she didn't have a heating pad and couldn't afford one (snake had been on a roughly 10-day feeding schedule). She finally got one and the snake ate 4 months after she received it.

[Bogertophis]

...
It is weird that reptiles are a luxury item that attract a lot of people who aren't remotely financially set to keep them. My most recent case was someone who bought a rosy boa from me ($375 with shipping) and let me know 8 weeks later that the snake wasn't eating because she didn't have a heating pad and couldn't afford one (snake had been on a roughly 10-day feeding schedule). She finally got one and the snake ate 4 months after she received it.

That makes me want to scream! It's also one of the reasons I stopped breeding snakes...too many buyers cannot be trusted to take proper care, & it's not like the information isn't available.

[Malum Argenteum]

That makes me want to scream! It's also one of the reasons I stopped breeding snakes...too many buyers cannot be trusted to take proper care, & it's not like the information isn't available.

Yes, breeding and selling involves some degree of intentional doublethink -- the evaluative thought that breeding is a good thing for those offspring, and the basic reality that many keepers are pretty far off base with their care.

I'm not so sure about the information availability, since SEO is such a big factor. The first hit for 'ball python care' on the wild web is the most well known collection of files about reptiles, where glass enclosures are one of the recommended enclosure types along with heat lamps, with a basking surface temp of 95-104F; rotating in ASFs, gerbils and hamsters as feeders is recommended, as is multivitamin supplementation (with reasoning and product suggestions that indicate a very basic lack of understanding of the situation).

To circle back to the vet topic, a novice keeper might get their BP hooked on gerbils after getting some off Craigslist and thinking they'll be giving their BP "a spectrum of nutrition". Then when the snake won't go back to rats, they might take it to the vet who may well not realize the connection unless they're actually a snake keeper (and at any rate this won't be an 'illness visit').

I realize that a bunch of this is pretty tangential to the pet insurance topic. Hopefully that's OK, Homebody.