Does Pet Insurance Have Payout Limits?
All pet insurance policies have limits to what they will pay out. Every pet insurance policy has an annual maximum but not every policy has per-incident or lifetime limits. When you are comparing pet insurance policies, ask about the different limits and know what you're getting upfront, it can make a big difference when you make a claim.
Lifetime Limit
Some pet insurance companies have lifetime limits that cap how much they will pay out in total on your policy. Usually these lifetime limits are very high, from $50,000 to $100,000. In practical terms your pet is unlikely to hit this limit. The lifetime limit exists for statistical and underwriting reasons.
Annual Maximum
Your annual maximum is the maximum amount that your pet insurance company will reimburse you in any given year. Most pet insurance companies have policies that will reimburse you at least $5,000 to $10,000 per year.
Per-Incident Limits
Some pet insurance companies impose a per-incident limit and some extend this per-incident limit to recurring or chronic conditions too. For example, let's say your cat's policy has a per-incident limit of $1,500.
Now let's say your cat gets pneumonia and the pet insurance company pays out $1,200 for treatment. No matter what happens now or in the future your pet insurance company will only pay out $300 more for pneumonia-related illnesses, until you reach your per-incident limit of $1,500. After that you won't receive a cent more, ever. Worse still is that you won't know in advance what the pet insurance company considers to be related to your cat's pneumonia.
The disadvantage of per-incident limits is that, although your annual maximum might be $11,000, you're unlikely to be reimbursed anywhere near that because the per-incident limits put a ceiling on how much the pet insurance company will reimburse.
Per-System Limits
A few pet insurance policies impose per-system limits instead of per-incident limits. They function similarly to per-incident limits except that instead of limiting the amount of reimbursement for a given diagnosis the pet insurance policy limits how much it will reimburse for a given bodily system such as the nervous system.
Again, once this limit is reached, there is no more coverage, regardless of how long you stay with the company.
What Sort of Limits Does Embrace Have?
Embrace only has one type of limit and that's your annual maximum, which we explain above. We do not have per-incident or other limits so you don't ever get a rude surprise when you make a claim.