I have a soon to be 12yo gelding. I’ve always had medical and mortality insurance on him with Kaplow (since he was 3).
It seems like it just goes up and up each year. I’ve only had one small claim.
I’m not dissatisfied with their service, I’d just like to know who other people are using that I could explore to see if they might be less expensive. Any suggestions?
I think they’re all going up in recent years.
You could try The Hartford. They have less coverage than say Hallmark for things like stem cells, PRP etc, but they were significantly cheaper for me.
Mine keeps going up in premium while cutting most services. At best, diagnostics are covered at only 50%. No injections are covered at all anymore, no barn call fees covered. I recently submitted a claim for over $1250 and got a check for a whopping $230 back. If I had to do it over again, I would not have bought insurance and instead banked the premium money each year for any eventual emergency once my horse gets older.
[QUOTE=IndysMom;8435521]
It seems like it just goes up and up each year. [/QUOTE]
Yep. That’s the point of this business. Risk sharing: you only had one small claim. You got your money’s worth. You might need to self-insure soon.
It sounds like “Kaplow” is an insurance broker, and they might be able to represent several different insurers - there aren’t too many insurers who underwrite equine anymore. So ask them.
Yep, I had a similar experience. I submitted over $500 in claims (spent over $1000), and got a check for $80. :lol: That sure helped.
I think I’ll be re-evaluating my policy when it’s time for renewal. Maybe dropping the medical coverage, and just having a mortality policy on my boy - and maybe look into SmartPak’s ColiCare policy.
Read the fine print on that SP colic policy, it’s pretty limited, lots of fine print and restrictions and they have to be on that specific product, IIRC its not generic colic coverage.
Horse insurance is like car, home, renter’s you pay premiums for years and years never having to file a claim, then one day something happens where you are darn glad you had good coverage.
I also believe that equine insurance increases as your horse ages - which is one of the reasons for increase in premiums
Actually, I disagree. I am a huge proponent of being properly insured–home, vehicles, farm policies, etc. A fire, a serious car accident, or a major lawsuit could bankrupt a person.
Horse insurance, IMO, falls into a different category. First of all, no one ever should ever go bankrupt due to vet bills. No reasonable person should ever have so much of their assets tied up in a single horse that the loss of that horse would bankrupt them. Also, no one should enter horse ownership if they don’t have enough of a financial cushion available to them to handle a humane level of veterinary care and the associated expenses. I’m not saying you have to have $8-10K set aside for surgery, but you better at least be able to handle a vet call for a colic, and if necessary, euthanasia.
Secondly, horse insurance is very expensive compared to other types of policies. Why? Because it is the nature of horses to injure themselves and while it isn’t the norm it also isn’t that unusual for a horse to die at a younger age. I think the industry has also suffered from a certain amount of fraudulent claims. I’m not interested in paying an inflated insurance rate to cover the insurance companies payouts (or investigations) of those fraudulent claims. By my calculation as an owner of multiple horses it is MUCH more cost effective for me to set aside what I would have spent on premiums and save that up for major vet bills.
Actually, what I do in reality (instead of having money sitting around in a bank account doing nothing which is not wise) is maximize the amount of money I put into retirement savings or other investments, and then have access to a source of borrowed money at a low interest rate (home equity line) in case of emergency. Psychologically, yes, it feels worse to be paying “my own money” when a horse gets sick or injured, but over the long run I have saved a lot of money by not insuring horses. Yes, I probably do second guess my decisions a lot more when it comes down to spending money on a sick horse, but I can handle that.
I will sum up by saying that horse insurance is definitely a useful tool when valuable horses are leased, sent out on trial, or owned by a partnership. But for private owners, I’m not sure it is a great value.
I had the same problem this year. I just can’t afford it anymore. So for the first time in 10 years my guys are only insured for mortality.
I used to be able to get medical with 100% diagnostic coverage for $450-500. This year it was going to be $900. So basically one claim was going to cost me $1250.00.
I use Broadstone for mortality and major medical on my horse. I think the underwriter is XL Insurance. I had to file a claim and deal with prolonged treatment and additional claims this year and they were fantastic about coverage. They covered everything except the farm visit charges until the policy year expired - including full coverage for stem cell therapy. This year they implemented a dollar limit on the stem cell therapy and copays, but you can waive the copays if you pay a slightly higher premium. Yes, it’s expensive, but it saved me $7000 out of pocket for my horses treatment when I needed it!
My horse exhibited some issues that needed looking into and my insurance agent urged me to go to a clinic “because it was covered”. She did mention that some was not. Turned out half was not. And the one thing they found would not be covered in the future. I considered not getting it next year. But when I think about it I mainly got it for a catastrophic episode that I could not afford to cover. Like a major colic. And that half that it paid this year was actually more than half the premiums I have paid so far. So I will continue.
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