America’s most popular retailer, Walmart, is adding to its recently launched suite of pet products and in-store pet services by teaming up with the most popular pet insurance provider, Nationwide…However, the new Walmart-Nationwide alliance may have come as a surprise to Walmart’s other pet insurance partner, Petplan – including Petplan CEO Paul Guyardo.
Working with apparently no publicity, a group of state insurance regulators who formed a Pet Insurance task force under the auspices of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) in 2019 is approaching the finish line of a working draft for what could ultimately be America’s first significant piece of legislation for the fast growing pet insurance industry.
Amid the Pandemic Puppy Boom, Walmart is taking the plunge into the U.S. pet health insurance market. The mega-retailer’s decision to get into the pet insurance business — still a niche industry in the U.S. with less than 5% of pets now covered by an insurance policy–may be a gamechanger. Can Walmart take the pet insurance market mainstream?
It’s been a busy and successful year for the U.S. pet insurance market at large, which has seen eight newcomers since 2017 alone: Wagmo (2020), Spot (started in 2019 with personality Cesar Milan as its figure head), Lemonade (July 2020), Prudent Pet (2018), TrustedPals (2019), Bivvy (2018), Companion Protect (2017), and Pumpkin (2019). The newcomers offer some of the most budget friendly options in the pet insurance market, but there are a staggering number of pitfalls neatly tucked away inside the fine print of the policies.
Digital media company Group Nine Media Inc., which is backed by Discovery Inc. and owns The Dodo (“emotionally and visually compelling, highly sharable” animal content), has taken a minority stake in pet insurance company Petplan, the companies announced in a joint press release yesterday.
Americans may have less money to spend, but what they have, they appear to be spending on their dogs and more notably, on pet health insurance, a relatively small but exponentially growing market as Americans discover that their dog’s health insurance policy can be better than any policy the human members of their families have access to….
BluePearl, a high-end network of specialty and emergency veterinary hospitals, announced last week that its hospitals have seen a 70 percent increase in parvovirus cases:
Now that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has confirmed two cases of household cats in New York with SARS-CoV-2 and, now, the reports of a family dog with the virus in North Carolina pending USDA confirmation, The Canine Review has asked the country’s major pet health insurance providers if and how each would cover SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics and treatment for cats and dogs.
VPI (or Veterinary Pet Insurance), founded in 1980, was the first company to sell pet insurance in the United States. In 2009, the company was purchased by Nationwide.
Nationwide/VPI has been and remains the largest and most popular pet insurer in the U.S. market, with 36.33% of the market share, according to NAPHIA.
While it may be the oldest and the most popular, TCR also found that it had some of the worst pitfalls of any insurer.
For starters, there appears to be a directive in place instructing customer service/insurance agents not to send even sample or boilerplate copies of the company’s pet insurance product to any individual who is not a policyholder. In other words, prospective customers are refused requests for sample policies. And it’s not as if the website makes it easy to find a copy of a policy.
Healthy paws get nailed by regulators.