Max Benefit Pet Insurance

Max Benefit Pet Insurance

As a pet owner, you will probably become familiar with the various forms of pet insurance available to you. There are essentially four different forms, all at slightly different price points and all offering a different level of cover.

In this article we’re going to look in detail at one of these four types: so-called ‘maximum benefit’ insurance.

We’ll examine what level of cover this form of insurance offers to pet owners – and we’ll also compare it with the insurance type we offer at Purely Pets, known as lifetime pet insurance.

Why a pet insurance policy is recommended for pet owners

We’re going to take a good look at the intricacies of maximum benefit (or ‘max benefit’) insurance, and how it stacks up against other forms of pet insurance policy out there. But first, it’s useful to remind ourselves why pet insurance is useful in the first place.

Although we all wish for a long and healthy life for all our pets, the truth is that most pets will require some sort of veterinary treatment at least once in their life. What’s more, in the event of an accident or illness, the costs of this treatment can easily climb into the hundreds of pounds.

Many pet owners simply won’t have budgeted for an expense like this, and – at a time when they should be concentrating on their pet’s welfare – will find themselves worrying about money. By contrast, having an insurance policy in place will give you some financial cover against large unforeseen expenses like these. 

Simply put, pet insurance may well save you money in the long term, because of the financial assistance it will provide towards expensive veterinary treatments and procedures. At the very least, an insurance policy’s regular, predictable outgoings will help you budget sensibly and clearly for life with your beloved pet.

Pet insurance policies may also feature certain additional benefits, such as dental treatment and ‘farewell cover’ (help with the expenses you will face at the end of your pet’s life). Many insurers will also offer a multi pet discount, in which you can make savings if you take out insurance for more than one pet from the same provider.

Finally, dog owners will be interested to know that certain insurance policies may also feature Third Party Liability insurance – this addition to some forms of pet insurance covers any damage caused by your dog to another person or their property.

Small wonder, then, that various key authorities in the animal welfare field, including the RSPCA and the British Veterinary Association, recommend taking out pet insurance.

To find out if pet insurance is right for you, take a look at our dedicated page (here) for more information.

What is maximum benefit pet insurance?

Let’s now take a look, specifically, at maximum benefit pet insurance.

What exactly is this form of insurance?

What does it cover?

And how does it compare, in terms of both cost and cover, to the other pet insurance policies on the market?

Essentially, maximum benefit pet insurance will cover your dog or cat, for each injury or illness they suffer – up to a specified limit. Unlike with a time-limited policy (another form of insurance that we’ll come to shortly), holders of a maximum benefit insurance policy typically have no time limit within which the claim must be made.

Instead, you can keep claiming for the same injury or illness until you reach the financial cap – the maximum benefit implied in the name.

Of course, you’ll need to renew your policy each year to continue to enjoy this benefit. Because this type of insurance applies a claims limit to each condition, rather than to a time period, you may sometimes hear it called ‘per condition’ pet insurance.

Advantages of maximum benefit pet insurance

With this type of insurance, you will always know exactly how much you are covered for, as each injury or illness will come with a fixed amount of cover. So, for example, you may have a per-condition limit for, say, ear infections, of £5,000. If your Cocker Spaniel, Maine Coon or other pet develops an ear infection, you will enjoy up to £5,000 of cover for that specific condition.

Note that other conditions will have their own, separate claims limits – and that these won’t be affected by your claims against the ear infection.

This type of policy is also not time-limited. A condition may last for days, or for years – you can still continue to claim for it. It will also prove particularly useful if your pet has a condition that requires regular medication or treatment (such as regular physiotherapy sessions) as it may help to cover the costs of this over time.

Disadvantages of maximum benefit pet insurance

Maximum benefit insurance clearly has some attractive features. However, there are potential disadvantages, too.

For example, the limit for each condition is finite, even if you keep renewing the policy. So, let’s pick up the example above, of a Cocker Spaniel with an ear infection. That condition may continue to trouble your pet but, once that particular cover limit (£5,000, in our example) is reached, your insurer will no longer pay for claims related to that particular condition – even after you renew the policy.

Remember, of course, that other conditions will have their own limits, and as long as you haven’t yet reached these, you will still be able to continue to claim for those as long as the insurance policy is kept up to date.

You may also find that, if your pet requires some fairly expensive treatment – surgery, for example – you reach the limit for a particular condition fairly quickly. All costs after that point will then have to be borne by you. This is not the case with lifetime insurance, which we will come to next.

Another thing we should mention is that you won’t get cover for any conditions that have already been diagnosed in your pet before you took out the insurance policy. To be fair, though, this is common to all the forms of insurance we’ll be mentioning – even the more expensive lifetime insurance.

For this reason, we would always recommend beginning any condition-based insurance policy like this while your pet is still young and has not yet developed any medical conditions. Then, any conditions that your pet subsequently develops should be covered by your insurance but always check your policy wording carefully.

However, if you do need pet insurance for a pre-existing condition, you are probably best off seeking out a specialist insurance provider. 

For more information on Purely Pets pet insurance, click here.

Want to find out more about our Pet Insurance Product? 

We’ve listed our key benefits below and you can also take a look at our cover levels, customer reviews and awards.

Ready to get started? Click here to get a quote.

The Purely Pet Promise

At Purely, we’re here to support you. That’s why we offer a 24 Hour Vet Helpline free of charge to all of our customers. Our easy to use online portal ‘Manage My Policy’, enables you to access to your policy 24hrs a day. This provides greater flexibility, allowing you to manage your policy at a time that suits you, so that you can spend more time with your furry friends, and less time managing your insurance. Get a quote

What form of insurance does Purely Pets offer?

Here at Purely Pets, we concentrate exclusively on providing lifetime pet insurance. This is because we believe that pet owners will want the very best for their beloved animals.

In the event of any illness or accident, you won’t want to be worrying about whether your insurance will provide cover. Rather, you want to concentrate all your energies on looking after your furry companion.

What’s more, insurance with Purely Pets comes with a number of attractive benefits. These include:

24-Hour Vet Helpline

All Purely Pets insurance customers have access to a round-the-clock vet professional whenever they have a concern.

Calls are handled by a national network of veterinary nurses registered with the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. All of them have at least three years’ practical experience.

No upper joining age limit

We are pleased to welcome new cat and dog customers at any age.

No fewer than 15 levels of lifetime cover

We have a wide range of levels of lifetime insurance, so you can choose the best fit for your pet – and for your budget. We can provide lifetime cover of up to £15,000.

Choose your excess from just £80

If you’re not familiar with the term ‘excess’, don’t worry – it’s a fairly simple concept. Essentially, it’s a one-off contribution that an insurance provider asks you to make towards each claim you submit.

You can often make your insurance premium cheaper by agreeing to a higher excess. If you don’t think you’ll be making too many claims – say your pet is young and healthy, and doesn’t get into that many scrapes – you might want to agree to a higher excess.

However, it is always difficult to predict what number, and type, of claims you may need to make across a pet’s lifetime.

Here at Purely Pets, we like to be flexible – which is why we’ve set our minimum excess as low as £80 per claim.

If you have any more questions related to pet insurance, or the health of your pet in general, check out the FAQs section of our website.

Apart from maximum benefit cover, what other pet insurance policies can I choose from?

If you’re looking to insure a beloved pet, you do have quite a few options – of which maximum benefit insurance is just one.

Here at Purely Pets, for example, we don’t offer maximum benefit cover. Instead, we offer lifetime insurance, as we believe that this is the best possible way to take full care of your pet across their lifetime.

So, how does lifetime cover differ from maximum benefit insurance?

As we have seen, the latter policy offers a fixed, one-off amount per condition, which simply runs out when you reach the claims limit for that condition. Conversely, lifetime insurance also offers a fixed amount per condition – but, crucially, the amount resets each time you carry out your annual insurance policy renewal.

Lifetime insurance is usually the most expensive form of insurance – something to bear in mind when you are budgeting for the costs of pet ownership in general, and of pet insurance in particular. However, in return for that larger outlay you will get the most comprehensive cover of all the pet insurance types.

While maximum benefit insurance customers may find that they use up all their cover for a certain health condition and then have to fund all future treatment themselves, those pet owners with lifetime insurance will find that their claims are reset to zero each time policy renewal comes around. This means that they won’t have to keep an eye on their claims limits for each condition.

So, you might have claimed a large amount of cover to treat, say, your dog’s diabetes during a certain year, and you may be worried that such a large claim will exhaust your cover for the future.

But don’t worry: your cover for diabetes (and for all other conditions besides) will reset to zero when you next renew, meaning that you and your pet can enjoy the full amount of cover again across the next policy year.

Note that, like maximum benefit insurance above, lifetime insurance will not cover you against pre-existing conditions.

Are there cheaper forms of insurance than lifetime or benefit pet insurance?

Yes, there are. Specifically, there are two further types of pet insurance that owners can choose from. Both are cheaper than the two we have mentioned so far, but will offer less cover as a result.

First up you have time-limited pet insurance, which provides cover against a range of accidents or illness, but for a set time period only – often one year.

So is this the opposite of maximum benefit pet insurance, with a limit on time where the latter places a limit on claims instead? Well, not quite.

That’s because time-limited pet insurance will include a claim limit for each condition, as well as a time limit. 

So if, for example, your Dachshund suffers from intervertebral disc disease, under this form of insurance you will have a certain amount of cover – but it has a cap, and it must be used within a certain time period as well.

A notable feature of this insurance policy type, however, is that any stretch of time during which you did not make any claims, is carried over into your next policy.

Say, for example, that you had an annual time-limited insurance policy but made no claims for the first nine months, at which point your pet fell ill and you made a claim. Those nine months would be added to your next year of cover.

However, when either the set period ends or you reach the fixed sum amount, your pet will no longer have cover for that particular injury or illness. In fact, do check the terms and conditions carefully, as some examples of time-limited insurance feature a combined payout limit across all conditions.

In this case, once you’d reached this limit across all your claims, cover would stop until you next renewed the insurance policy – even if, for certain individual conditions, you hadn’t yet got near your cover limit.

The final variety of insurance cover we need to tell you about is accident-only pet insurance. This is the cheapest form – and, typically, offers the most basic form of cover.

Specifically, holders of accident-only insurance can only claim for expenses related to an accident suffered by their pet. Illnesses and ongoing health conditions are not covered by this type of policy.

In a similar vein to maximum benefit insurance above, accident-only cover will include a maximum claim for each (accidental) injury, valid across each year for which you hold the policy.

Elsewhere – and, again, like other insurance forms – accident-only insurance may feature a ‘per accident’ limit. z

You may eventually exceed a lifetime limit for treatment for a certain accident, even if you have been careful not to exceed each annual limit. As ever, read the small print to see what is and isn’t permitted.

As a rule of thumb, this type of insurance may be better suited to young, healthy cats and dogs. They may be more likely to have an accident but less likely to develop an ongoing health condition.

Customer reviews

We’re committed to improving our Pet Insurance products wherever possible, which is why feedback from our customers is so important to us. We’re incredibly proud of our Excellent Trustpilot rating and you can read the latest reviews from our fantastic customers below.

Find out more

You can find out more about our Dog Insurance product below and there’s more help available on our FAQs page.