My Pet Insurance Won’t Cover My Dog’s Medication. Here’s What I’m Doing to Save

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It’s a cost I’m stuck with, but I’m dealing with it. 

At this point, our dog, Champ, has lived in our home for about 2.5 years. And it’s hard to remember a time when I didn’t have to share my bed with a 72-pound giant or get interrupted 15 times a day by his barking right outside my office.

Adopting Champ is one of the best decisions my family has ever made. But one poor decision we made was not getting pet insurance right away. And now, we’re paying the price.

When your insurer won’t cover a pre-existing condition

It’s common for pet insurance companies to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions for animals. And that’s why our insurer won’t pay for my dog’s arthritis medication, which costs us several hundred dollars a year.

See, when we got Champ, we were more focused on helping him adjust to life in our home than buying insurance (he’d been bounced around a bunch as a rescue, so we were sensitive to that). Since he initially got a clean bill of health at the vet, we figured we could take our time shopping around for the right coverage.

Only shortly after his adoption, Champ began to limp and show signs of pain. The reason it only first came out on our watch was that his previous caregivers didn’t take him running — namely because he’s really hard to keep up with. But since my husband and I are runners, we started running with him daily, which wound up not being the best thing for his arthritic joints.

Now, there was no way we could’ve known he had arthritis until he started showing signs. After all, he was a pretty young dog (just 3.5 years old) when he came to us. But this condition, our vet tells us, is fairly common for large breeds even at a young age. And thankfully, it’s easily treatable with medication.

But because this condition was diagnosed before we put pet insurance in place, our coverage won’t pay for it. Our insurer also won’t pay for the yearly bloodwork Champ needs to make sure his meds aren’t causing too many side effects. And that’s another couple of hundred dollars a year we have to fork over.

Making room in our budget

Champ isn’t our first dog, so we knew going into his adoption to budget for certain costs. And actually, our last dog had a lot of health issues toward the end of his life, so we knew to pad our savings account in case our next dog happened to come with a host of medical problems.

Still, we’ve had to make some adjustments to account for the cost of Champ’s care. One thing we now do is groom him ourselves, even though it’s torturous (imagine having to hold down a 72-pound animal who hates being bathed and having his fur dried). We’ve also had to scrap certain weekend plans that would require us to hire a dog-walker, because we’re looking to avoid that expense given that we have these other costs to contend with.

Furthermore, we’ve made an effort to be more frugal in general since taking on the expense of a dog. We still order takeout and treat our kids to things like ice cream at the local shop. But we do those things less frequently now.

Get pet insurance right away

Forbes reports that pet insurance costs an average of $44 per month for a dog for $5,000 of annual coverage. And paying for pet insurance could get you off the hook for paying for other costs related to a condition your pet is diagnosed with.

I regret the fact that we didn’t buy insurance for Champ right away. But I’m thankful that the cost of his care is manageable.

If it were more expensive, we’d still find a way to make it work. But this way, at least we only have to make small adjustments to compensate, not major ones.

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