What’s the difference between a pet insurance policy and a pet health plan?

Many pet owners use the term ‘Pet Health Plan’ and ‘Pet Insurance Policy’ interchangeably. However, these two products do, in fact, provide budgeting options for very different types of veterinary care.

The differences can be confusing, but it is important to know and understand what they are, so that you can select the products that are right for you to help ensure you are caring for your pet in the best possible way. This guide aims to help you understand the differences between health plans and insurance, and how they can complement one another to provide comprehensive care for your dog or cat.

Pet Health Plan or Pet Insurance?

In short, a pet health plan helps to ‘prevent’ and pet insurance aims to help ‘cure’.

Pet health plans will generally allow you to budget for necessary preventative treatment costs, such as annual vaccinations and flea and worming treatments, through a monthly direct debit payment.

Pet insurance, on the other hand, can protect you from unexpected and potentially expensive veterinary fees should your pet have an accident or become ill. There are many different types of insurance policy and some provide more cover than others! You can read more about the types of pet insurance here.

What is a Pet Health Plan?

A Pet health plan is a helpful and convenient way to save money on your pet’s health and preventative care. A pet health plan is recommended to help protect your pet from serious infectious diseases and to shield your pet from the threat of fleas and worms. Vetsure Pet Health Plans include routine healthcare that you will require throughout your pet’s lifetime, and other helpful benefits for dogs and puppies, cat and kittens and rabbits of any age. As a minimum, all participating Vetsure Pet Health Plan practices will provide your pet with annual core vaccinations (including Kennel cough if recommended by your vet), flea and worming treatments and microchipping, as well as an additional 5% discount off your pet’s insurance policy. You can find more information on our cat, dog and rabbit pet health plans, here. 

Your local veterinary practice may also offer additional benefits as part of your health plan.

A pet health plan will not cover your pet should they suffer from an accidental injury or develop an illness. If you want protection for these things, you may wish to take out a pet insurance policy.

What is Pet Insurance?

When your canine or feline friend is feeling out of sorts, the last thing you want is to be worrying about vet bills. That’s where pet insurance comes in. A pet insurance policy is generally also administered by a monthly direct debit, but helps you deal with unexpected vet bills if your pet falls ill or gets themselves into a mishap.  Pet insurance policies do not normally cover preventative health treatment and products though – this is the job for a pet health plan. 

What you can get out of your pet insurance policy depends on which policy you choose. With a Vetsure insurance policy, you can claim against an unlimited number of conditions – you just choose how much vet fee cover you need per condition. We have tried to make understanding pet insurance as easy as possible for you on our How much cover do you need page.

Vetsure Pet Insurance policies can be tailored to suit your needs. Our Accident Only policy will help to cover your pet should they get themselves accidentally injured. Our Premier policy could help protect your pet from both accident and illness up to £4,000 per condition for veterinary fees, and Premier Plus could help protect from accident and illness up to £7,000 per condition in veterinary fees. For more information on our policies, click here.

With Vetsure, Both our Pet Health Plans and Pet Insurance policies can be paid in affordable, interest free monthly payments and we can work with your local veterinary practice so that you never need to worry about how to claim or anything that may be stressful relating to admin of your pet health plan or insurance.

Care for the best of health, cover for the worst

We appreciate our many customers who proactively look after their pet throughout their lifetime. We know, that for many responsible pet owners, insuring a pet is a necessity to cover them for costs arising from accidents, illnesses and emergency care. That is why, at Vetsure, we are keen to reward all our responsible pet owners who are proactive in looking after their beloved pets by linking prevention with cure. This means pet owners will receive lower insurance premiums when they combine their insurance policy with a Vetsure Pet Health Plan, for the same pet. The discount can be applied to the Vetsure Pet Insurance policy regardless of whether you are taking out a new policy or when an existing policy renews.

Prevention is better than cure, but why not budget for both? Contact our team on 0800 050 2022 or email [email protected] if you have an active Vetsure Pet Health Plan and you would like to take advantage of a discount on a new or existing Vetsure Pet Insurance policy.