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What is Accident & Illness Pet Insurance? (Plus: Why You Should Offer It)

By The Boost Team on Jan 28, 2023
6 min read
Learn the definition of Accident and Illness pet insurance, and how it can help your business.

Pet accidents and illnesses are unfortunately common, which can cause considerable financial hardship for pet owners. The average emergency vet visit costs $800-$1500, and pet owners in America collectively spend over $34B annually on veterinary care. 

If your business caters to pet owners, this presents a significant opportunity for you to offer your customers a service they need. In this blog, we’ll explain what accident and illness pet insurance is and how your business can use it to grow new recurring revenue and build deeper relationships with your customers.

What is Accident and Illness Insurance for Pets? 

As its name indicates, accident and illness pet insurance is a kind of insurance policy that reimburses pet owners for necessary veterinary costs in the event of an accident or illness (up to a certain amount). Typically, a base pet insurance policy will cover emergency veterinary care, and examinations to diagnose, treat, or operate on a covered injury or illness. This can include things like:

  • Consultations, physical exams, health inspections, and office visits

  • Surgical procedures

  • Tests like X-rays, CT scans, ultrasounds, and blood tests

  • Medical supplies for treating the issue

  • Hospitalization 

  • Pet ambulance fees

Without insurance, these services can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. It’s not surprising that more and more Americans are considering pet health insurance to ensure they can afford care for their pets. 

Accident vs. Illness in Pet Insurance: What's the Difference? 

A standard policy will have rules about what qualifies as a “covered” issue for the purpose of reimbursement. So what exactly is considered an “accident” and what is an “illness?” The answers may seem obvious, but knowing the precise definitions can be important. If a pet owner needs a service that falls outside of those categories, they would need to add it as additional coverage in order to receive those benefits. 

An accident is usually defined as something like “a sudden or unexpected event that causes injury to the pet." For example, if your cat is injured by another animal, or your dog eats a box of chocolate and needs emergency vet care. Events like these would be defined as “accidents” and be covered by most accident pet insurance policies. It should be noted, however, that if the owner causes intentional harm to their pet, that would fall under abuse and would generally not be covered. 

An illness is usually defined as something like "any change to the normal healthy state of the pet, a sickness, disease, or medical condition that is not caused by an accident.” An example of an illness that would typically be covered by illness insurance would be something like heartworms, canine flu, skin rashes, diabetes, or arthritis. Due to cost and complexity, however, cancer treatment is often excluded from accident and illness policies. 

The distinction between the accident and illness is important, because it can affect whether a pet’s care is covered. Many standard pet insurance policies cover both accident and illness, but there are policies that may only cover accidents. It’s important for potential policyholders to understand what they’re getting, and if it’s a good fit for their needs.

Will Pet Insurance Cover An Existing Condition? 

Unfortunately, the short answer is “no.” As a general rule, if a pet has a pre-existing health condition, treatment for that condition will usually not be covered by the insurance policy. However, a pre-existing condition will not necessarily disqualify the pet from being covered entirely. For example, if a dog has pre-existing allergies, and his owner purchased a pet insurance policy for him, any treatments related to his allergy likely wouldn’t be covered. If the dog contracted heartworms after the policy was purchased, however, his treatment could be covered. 

This is great motivation for pet owners to get insurance when their pets are young. When it comes to purchasing medical protection, “the earlier the better” very much applies, because as pets age, they are more likely to develop conditions. If a pet owner waits until their pet starts to show symptoms, it can be too late to get the financial protection they need. 

Additional Pet Insurance Coverage

Insurance needs will vary for every pet, and sometimes those needs fall outside of standard policy coverage. Some pet breeds have a higher risk of conditions requiring long-term care – while for others, the biggest risk is playing too hard at the park. To accommodate for those differences, pet owners can choose to add endorsements to their policies, such as: 

  • Preventative care: Many accident and illness policies only cover care if the pet is sick or injured, but don’t cover routine check-ups and other preventative care. An endorsement might extend coverage to include things like vaccines, parasite prevention, (flea medication, heartworm pills, etc), spaying or neutering, and other routine health maintenance costs

  • Cancer treatment: As previously mentioned, cancer treatment is an outlier among illnesses as most pet insurance policies do not cover it. Cancer treatment is usually expensive and treatment is typically complex or ongoing. A cancer treatment endorsement can cover things like chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or immunotherapy.

  • Dental care: Animal dentistry is a specialized field, some of which can be handled by a standard vet visit, but other treatments cannot. Coverages for treatment like tooth-related injuries, such as crowns, root canals, or tooth extractions would typically need to be added as an endorsement. 

  • Prescription drugs: Pet medications are not usually included in a base policy, but it can often be added as an endorsement. This might include both short-term medicine for treating an illness (such as antibiotics), and regular medications to manage conditions like allergies.

  • Alternative therapies: Standard pet health policies usually do not cover treatments like acupuncture, hydrotherapy, or physical therapy for pets, but these can sometimes be added through endorsements.

Even more comprehensive policies might cover loss and theft, kennel/boarding services, or even advertising a missing pet and offering a reward for its return. Depending on the provider, pet owners can fully customize their policies and make them as robust or as simple as they need, which can save them thousands of dollars. 

Why Your Business Should Offer Pet Insurance (And How to Do It)

Now that we’ve seen how valuable accident and illness pet insurance can be for pet owners to have, let’s briefly talk about the opportunity that this product offers for pet-related business owners.

Growing Demand for Pet Insurance

There is an increasing demand for pet insurance in the United States. Since 2017, the average annual growth rate of insured pets is 21.5%. At the end of 2021, close to 4.41 million pets were insured, a 28% increase since 2020. In 2022, the total premium revenue for pet insurance was nearly $2.6 billion. That is a huge market with a promising annual growth rate. 

White-labeled, embedded insurance can be a big opportunity for pet businesses to tap into that market and build new streams of recurring revenue. If your clientele is primarily pet owners, you are perfectly positioned to offer this product. Accident and illness pet insurance would be a natural addition to your product lineup, and because your customers already trust and have a relationship with you, they would be more inclined to get the coverage they need from you instead of an insurance company. 

Other Benefits of Entering the Insurance Market

1. Deepen your customer relationships

Insurance is a very “sticky” product. Due to the nature of insurance, it establishes an ongoing relationship with your customers through monthly premium payments. Not only would you have the benefit of that recurring revenue, but you also have the ongoing brand exposure that it provides. It gives you another touch point with your customers, which can only strengthen your long-term relationships with them.

2. A modern, digital experience

Modern customers expect modern experiences. Traditional insurance carriers and policies tend to be rigid with a mixture of slow offline processes and archaic online ones. By offering your customers a customizable, convenient, and entirely digital solution, you can meet your customers in the 21st century and stand out from the competition. 

Embedded insurance, as its name implies, is insurance that is embedded into an existing purchasing experience–it allows your customers to buy digital pet insurance without requiring them to leave your website to complete the transaction. Another example of embedded insurance would be travel insurance for an online plane ticket or crypto wallet insurance offered on a crypto-related website. 

A white-labeled insurance product is one that is completely integrated not only into your website, but also into your brand. If you were to offer white-labeled pet insurance, your customers would have no indication that the product was not created by your company. 

Embedded pet insurance is a great opportunity for pet business owners to grow their revenue and deepen their customer relationships.  If you are interested in embedded accident and illness pet insurance, Get the Guide to Growing Your Revenue with Embedded Pet Insurance, and learn everything you need to know to get started. 

If you’d like to speak to one of our pet insurance experts, contact us to learn more.

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As an insurance infrastructure-as-a-service partner, Boost provides more than just white-label insurance products: we also provide the technical infrastructure necessary to digitally offer those products on your website.  The most important part of any insurance tech stack is the policy administration system (PAS), which is the system of record for every transaction related to an insurance policy. As part of Boost’s API platform, we deliver a state-of-the-art policy admin system (PAS) to support our products at every stage of their policies’ lifecycle. What makes Boost’s policy admin system so special? Here are seven factors that set us apart. One of the most complex parts of building a PAS is accounting for the differences between state insurance regulations. Insurance products must be approved by each individual state that you want to sell in, and each state has its own laws, regulations, and requirements regarding the sale of insurance. 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You’ll also get permanent access to a dedicated testing environment, so you can build out integrations and test new platform features with no surprises when you go live.  All this makes it easier than ever to get your developers up to speed, which means you can get to market or make updates to your integration that much faster. One reason why building a PAS is a complex and expensive process is that the system must be separately configured for each insurance product it supports, and each additional product adds to the cost and timeline. This can be a roadblock for insurtechs looking to expand their offerings with new lines of business. At Boost, our partners can choose from seven white-label insurance products (with more to come). Our PAS is fully configured to support each product at their launch, so our partner can easily add new LOBs by simply updating their existing API connections to include additional Boost products. Rather than needing to work with multiple insurance providers to get the breadth of products that you want to sell, and having to integrate multiple other systems and products into a PAS, you can integrate one time with Boost and still benefit from multiple lines. Growing your business by expanding your LOBs has never been simpler. It may feel like the entire world has gone all-digital, but a surprising amount of insurance isn’t quite there yet. Many traditional carriers provide partners with the ability to rate and quote customers digitally…but then switch to manual processes to complete the transaction. Critical insurance functions like issuing policies, creating endorsements, filing claims, or processing renewals regularly require you to contact the carrier, then wait for a response. Boost’s policy admin system supports an entirely digital workflow end–to-end, allowing you to offer your customers a truly seamless digital insurance experience. 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To learn more about insurance infrastructure-as-a-service through Boost, contact us, or dive into building your insurance program with Boost Launchpad
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Learn how APIs work, and the attributes of a high-quality API
What Makes a Good API?
Jan 13, 2023
APIs have become ubiquitous in modern technology - and in modern tech marketing. If you’ve ever looked into buying a software service or platform in the last ten years, the odds are that a good API was listed as one of the selling points. But what exactly makes an API “good?” Before we dive into that question, let’s take a minute to recap what APIs are, and why they’ve become so central to business and technology. Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are the mechanisms that allow computer software to communicate with each other. APIs ensure that when one software system makes a request, another system can understand the request and respond correctly. When discussing the relationship between two software systems, the application sending the request for action is called the client, and the application sending the response is called the server For example, your bank’s software system houses all of your banking data–that software system is the server. 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Another part will use that information to make calculations around premium costs, and still another part will generate the policy itself. In order to make sure this all happens seamlessly, developers need access to comprehensive, up-to-date documentation for how all these components interact and are executed via the API.  Finally, a key benefit of APIs in general is speed. Rather than trudging through manual processes, APIs are meant to automate functions that would take much longer if human interactions were required. A good API should allow information to be passed between servers quickly and efficiently. Going back to our earlier examples, no one wants to sit and wait to see if their bank transfer request or their insurance application was successfully received. For the best user experience, APIs should process requests in less than a second. If an API is slow to respond, it may indicate inefficient architecture, or that the servers are housed on insufficiently powerful hardware. 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What is Parental Leave Insurance?
May 10, 2022
If you’ve never heard of parental leave insurance, you’re not alone. Parental leave insurance is a relatively new product on the market but an increasingly necessary one. Let’s explore a few of the reasons why parental leave is important and what solutions insurance can offer.  Becoming a new parent is a major life event that can be happy and exciting, but it can also present challenges in the workplace for both employees and employers. Over 60 million Americans are parents, but the U.S. is one of the few countries worldwide with no universal parental leave requirements. As such, nearly 30% of working women quit their jobs after giving birth. In states that do require paid parental leave, however, the rate of mothers leaving the workforce dropped 20-50%. It’s no surprise that according to recent studies, “When deciding to accept a job offer, 66% of employees said the employer’s paid parental leave policy is important.”  Parental leave is a significant DEI issue for retaining female employees who become mothers. Social and cultural shifts over the past few decades have made this issue more important than ever. “With the increase in female employment rates, coupled with the decline of the male breadwinner family model…entitlements to job-protected leave after childbirth has become important policy measures to support parents” (EIGE).  Employees ranked parental leave as the third most desired benefit, outranked only by flexible work and paid insurance premiums, but many small and medium enterprises (SMEs) don’t offer it. In fact, only 23% of private employers in the U.S. offer paid parental leave in their benefits package, which puts SMEs at high risk of losing their employees when parenthood arises. Though paid parental leave is a highly requested benefit, it can be expensive for businesses to cover. For SMEs, this often prohibits them from offering any benefit at all. Adding to the difficulty, paid parental leave is also an unknown liability on the balance sheet. Employers can't predict if or when their employees will use it, which translates to a potentially large expense that they can’t accurately plan and budget for.  The Facebooks and Googles of the world can afford to be generous and pay that out of pocket, but many smaller companies can't. This puts those smaller companies at a disadvantage for both acquiring and retaining talent. In the absence of a national parental leave solution, it’s up to the private sector to find ways to support new parents in the workforce. Parental leave insurance is a business insurance innovation designed to make parental leave affordable for small and medium enterprises. This is how it works: an insurance provider offers the parental leave insurance product, sometimes as part of a larger business insurance suite. The SME chooses a package that covers the kind of leave they want to offer their employees. This includes factors like what percentage of the employee’s salary will be covered and the length of leave the SME will offer.  The SME then buys the policy, and pays the insurance provider a recurring premium based on their selected benefits and employee demographics. When a covered employee takes parental leave, the small or medium enterprise will file a claim through their insurance provider’s claims process. The SME will then be reimbursed for the cost of paying the employee during the covered leave period, as spelled out in the parental leave insurance policy.  It’s a solution for providing this benefit that mitigates large, unexpected leave costs. Instead, the employer pays a regular, planned amount in premiums, and can rest easy knowing their insurance policy will protect them. No more unknown liabilities on their balance sheet. Meanwhile, the SME can reap the benefits of attracting and retaining top talent by offering parental leave. With over 30 million small and medium enterprises in the U.S., there is a significant opportunity for insurtechs and embedded insurance providers to help businesses affordably provide this valuable benefit to their employees. Offering a first-of-its-kind, highly desirable insurance product is a forward-thinking way to set yourself and your clients apart in the market.  By offering parental leave insurance, you can help your clients attract and retain top talent. Employees are far more likely to work for a company where they feel supported, and this product is an effective way to establish your brand as focused on employees’ well-being while helping your clients to do the same. More than ever, employees want competitive, comprehensive, and inclusive insurance packages, and offering parental leave is an opportunity to positively impact employee experience and perception of their employer.  Additionally, adding parental leave insurance to your product lineup creates new cross-sell opportunities to boost revenue and LTV with your existing customers, and deepens their business relationship with you.  Parental leave insurance provides an opportunity to stand out from the competition. This is a first-of-its-kind product that is not being offered by many insurtechs, but benefits employers and employees alike. You have the opportunity to get ahead of the curve with this innovative white label insurance product.  If you want to learn more about growing your customer LTV with Boost’s Parental Leave Insurance, contact us.
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