What if a pet insurer could cover both expected and unexpected vet bills included in the monthly cost of your premium?

As responsible pet parents, you want to give your pets the best care possible, from healthy food, regular vet visits, plenty of exercise and of course, love and attention.

I’ve had a number of pet parents asking about the benefits of pet insurance and when discussing the topic of pet healthcare, a question that always comes up centred around preventive care for cats and dogs.

So, does pet insurance include preventive care in their plans and benefits? And if they do, is it worth paying more for benefits such as these?

Let’s find out…

Read: What Is Routine Care? And Does Pet Insurance Include Day-to-day Benefits In My Pet’s Cover?

What is preventive care?

To properly answer the questions related to this article, I reached out to the team at Oneplan Pet Insurance. My reason for chatting to them is that they deliver in their promise of making insurance simple and hassle-free. They have an effective way of breaking down the legal lingo and explaining things 

Preventive care, also known as wellness care or routine care, is a responsible way for you to ensure your pet leads a healthy and long life.

What procedures does preventive care include?

●        Vaccinations

●        Deworming

●        Sterilisation

●        Flea control

●        Tick control

●        Dental scaling and polishing

●        Nail clipping

●        Anal gland expression

What are the benefits of preventive care?

A good way of looking at preventive care is seeing it as PROACTIVE pet healthcare.

The benefits of routine care are second to none.

The first of which is that preventive care allows your vet to detect and treat any underlying health concerns before they develop into something more serious and more expensive to treat.

Not only that, but preventive care procedures such as dentistry will prevent gum disease (and in turn, organ failure should the periodontal disease significantly progress), vaccinations prevent a range of deadly diseases and illness, not to mention the benefits of sterilisation, and tick and flea control.

The same way that we as humans benefit from regular visits our doctor, dentist and optometrist, pets can also reap the rewards of routine care.

What are the costs of routine care?

Take a look at this blog where I covered a number of costs associated with responsible pet ownership.

Vaccinations range from R300 to R500 each. Deworming costs are between R20 and R80 each time.

Tick and flea control costs about R80 to R160.

Other costs such as dentistry, in which case scaling and polishing costs are categorised here, this procedure typically costs between R800 to R1 500.

What pet insurers include preventive care in their plans?

Great question.

After doing some digging, the pickings are rather slim when it comes to pet insurers who include routine care in the overall cost of their pet insurance plans.

During my chats with the Oneplan Team, they told me that they include routine care costs AND vet visit cover in 2 out of their 4 pet healthcare plans. They also recently created a new add-on product where you can double your routine care benefit limit or add routine care cover onto the Pet Hospital Plan, a healthcare plan which previously only included hospital cover benefits.

Routine Care benefit with Oneplan

What really sets Oneplan apart from other insurers is the fact that they will front you with cash before your vet visit.

They make this possible using their unique and user-friendly Onecard.

How this works is through the Oneplan App. Basically, all you have to do is log into the Oneplan App, preload your claim and the funds will be transferred to your Onecard. This transactional card is couriered to you when you sign up with Oneplan.

As mentioned, Oneplan recently changed their Routine Care Benefit to offer you more bang for your buck.

Routine Care PLUS

You can add the Routine Care PLUS benefit onto the Pet Classic Plan, Pet Super Plan AND the Pet Hospital Plan, the latter of which previously only included accident and illness cover.

Here’s how this works…

With Oneplan, your Routine Care Benefit works on a 12-month cycle - from the inception of your policy, and taking your limit into account.

With the Routine Care PLUS benefit, you can add on additional routine care cover at any time for a small monthly fee.

After activating this benefit, a 6 month waiting period will apply. After 6 months, you will receive your additional Routine Cover amount outlined in your chosen plan.

It gets better...

The Routine Care Plus benefit includes Oneplan’s excess buster.

This add-on product helps to cover the excess charged by Oneplan for a claim - this means you could save thousands in medical vet bills.

The final word

So, if you are looking for an insurer who includes routine care in their monthly premium (with a range of extensive benefits), then Oneplan is certainly the way to go.

Until next time,

The Pet Insurance Team