Pet Insurance Featured in New York Times

One of the things I like in my day job is the odd mish-mash of insurance products and specialty market segments I get to learn about. However, one product that hasn’t fallen into my corner of the P&C insurance neighborhood is pet insurance.

The New York Times this weekend has run an article looking at the product. (Although I am disappointed that it doesn’t feature anyone who’s commented on this site.)

Quoting the NYT:

The specialty is small: there are less than 600,000 insured pets. That is less than 1 percent of the more than 160 million cats and dogs in the United States, according to Chris Ashton, who recently studied the market on his way to starting Petplan USA, a pet insurance company based in Philadelphia.

Fewer than 20 companies now sell pet insurance in the United States, he said, and there are fewer than 500 pet insurance agents. Mr. Ashton’s venture has only 11 employees, but he plans to expand to 100 in the next three years.[...]

Both large companies and smaller start-ups are beginning to experiment with different offerings to customers, according to Mr. Volk. For example, Trupanion, based in Seattle, sells lifetime pet health insurance only for puppies and kittens, so pre-existing conditions are not a factor. The company plans to increase the number of employees who can sell insurance policies to 110 from 22 over the next three years. Nestlé Purina began offering pet health insurance in Canada last summer, and plans to enter the United States market this spring.

I will agree with one passing critical comment made in the article—that the products are rather complex at first glance, and a lack of standardization does make comparison-shopping a rather daunting exercise. When I was in the market not too long ago, I resorted to pulling rate and form filings from the Florida OIR archive to get at some of the details I was interested in…but I suspect that an average consumer wouldn’t want to go to that extent in their research.
I do wonder, however, how soon it will be for one of these pet insurers to create a package including liability cover, and perhaps have a marketing hook with a homeowners insurer who is otherwise leery of pet-liability claims….