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Emily Brill

About Emily Brill

https://thecaninereview.com

Emily Brill is the executive editor and founder of The Canine Review. The Canine Review is a subscription-only, independent online news service whose readers include thousands of veterinary professionals, pet industry leaders, journalists, and dog fanatics. As the pet industry’s only independent watchdog news service not beholden to advertisers, TCR provides much-needed accountability and greater transparency for this fast-growing, dynamic sub-sector of the economy which, until TCR, had not yet faced frequent and high-impact checks on its powerful institutions and stakeholders. A native New Yorker, Emily grew up in a media startup world and preferred newsrooms to playgrounds and classrooms. She has worked everywhere from Fox News Channel during its early days with Shepard Smith to Charlie Rose to CNN to CBS News’s Beijing Bureau (she lived and freelanced in Beijing for two years). Before founding TCR, her reporting as a freelancer was published in The New York Times’s China edition, The Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, The Atlantic, Chinafile.com, The South China Morning Post, and the Columbia Journalism Review.

Posts by Emily Brill:

Maine

Trupanion sues Maine insurance regulator
The suit hints at a larger, core challenge to Trupanion’s survival.

Trupanion’s complaint asserts:

“As of January 1, 2023-the effective date of the Maine Pet Insurance Act-the Bureau of Insurance has prohibited Trupanion and other pet insurance companies from deferring the effective date of policies issued in Maine. As a result, to avoid the anti-selection effect of certain consumers using the prohibition on waiting periods to obtain coverage for accidents that already occurred, Trupanion is requiring that consumers must have their pet examined by a veterinarian before the policy takes effect. Other insurers have largely pulled out of the market in Maine altogether including Nationwide, which along with Trupanion constitutes half the market share of the industry.”

With many more states set to enact similar laws starting January 1, 2024, this will inevitably draw attention to EDO’s. And, so, Maine seems to be the tip of an iceberg, with a larger battle looming for Trupanion, which would challenge the entire business model itself as more states pass similar legislation banning waiting periods and put Trupanion into an EDO-only revenue model, thereby putting the spotlight on the EDO and — its legality.

If territory partners (independently contracted local sales agents critical to Trupanion’s vet-centric business model) need to be licensed just to visit vet hospitals and educate vet professionals about pet insurance, how does Trupanion explain a system of relying upon vet hospital staff to introduce Trupanion and educate consumers about the EDO without being licensed?  

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VIN moral hazard reporting recycled

VIN News Recycles TCR’s ‘Moral Hazard Vets’ Insurance Reporting

It is a common practice in professional journalism that even competing news organizations credit each other as a matter of professional courtesy –unless one feels threatened by the other. In a three-part series of reports starting July 7, 2022, TCR offered coverage of Fetch By The Dodo (best known as Petplan but rebranded in light of its partnership with viral video animal blog The Dodo). The story was about its attempt to cut vet professionals out of coverage by declaring them a “moral hazard.” This led to our broader coverage of the issue at hand–the story VIN News has recycled and published one year later this week since our first story.

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Trupanion-TCR-shareholder-meeting-0623-004

Trupanion press release contradicted company’s own presentation to shareholders earlier in June

“I’m amazed by the Board’s silence, especially given your tweet last night showing the information on NY shared in the shareholder meeting on June 8 vs the press release on June 22. What I find most amazing – the June 22 press release specifically states that the NY price increase was NOT included in the company’s financial guidance,” he said, referring to company guidance provided to investors on May 4 for the full year which he said did not include projections for NY or CA rate filings. “How could it not be included in guidance if they classified the state as approved on June 8? I’ve been an early stage investor for years. This is not how financial projections are built,” he added. 

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