Do you have a beloved dog or cat, or perhaps you have another house pet for which you want to get insurance? If so, you're not alone. U.S. pet owners spent more than $1 billion on pet insurance in 2018. That is a jump of 23% in money spent on covering pets from previous years. It is estimated that 1.8 million dogs and cats are covered by insurance now, according to the North American Pet Health Insurance Association. Often, owners are promised affordable, lifetime health care for their pets, but that may not always be the case. A two-month Consumers' Checkbook investigation found that most accident and illness plans end up being neither affordable nor lifelong, according to an article published by the Washington Post.

Here are some important takeaways:

You can read the full Washington Post article here.

Price hikes:

Most buyers sign up for insurance when their pets are young, and monthly premiums are the lowest. But four or five years later, the premiums most companies charge start to rise — purely because the pets get older. Sooner or later, the price may become unaffordable.

Costs can outweigh benefits:

Every six seconds, a pet owner faces a vet bill of $1,000 or more, according to PetInsuranceQuotes.com, an online marketplace. That may sound scary. But in a country of 185 million cats and dogs, that works out to about a 3% chance of it happening to your pet over a year. In a study done by Consumer Checkbook, insurance was a worse deal when the cat or dog was lucky to have only low to moderate health problems and a better deal when they suffered lots of medical issues. But the problem with spending so much to insure against disaster is that the odds of calamity are fairly long.

Tips for buying pet insurance:

• Before buying, learn how your premium will increase as your pet ages by using the insurer's online quote engine. First, get a monthly premium quote using your pet's age; then get quotes for the 10 or 12 years. Multiply each age's monthly premium by 12; then add up all the resulting annual premiums to estimate what insurance will cost over that period.
• Understand what's not covered. A leading complaint to regulators is claims being rejected for conditions or treatments not covered by the policy. No policy covers preexisting conditions, and some conditions that are covered may be considered preexisting if they develop up to a year after you enroll. If your pet is ill or injured, the diagnostic exam is often not covered by many plans, even though the treatment is covered. Follow-up exams for that covered condition are often not covered, either. Those $50 to $100 exam fees amount to a hidden, added deductible.
• Avoid claim rejection for a preexisting condition by insuring your pet when it's a puppy or kitten — before it has a chance to develop a preexisting condition (but don't forget the caveat above). You can enroll when your pet is 6 to 8 weeks of age.
• Forget add-ons for wellness, preventive and elective care. When Checkbook added up the lifetime costs of a dog's routine care, about $2,400, and used that information to compare Nationwide's Whole Pet with Wellness plan, it found that adding wellness coverage was a poor deal. Total lifetime Whole Pet premiums for the dog were much higher — almost $11,400 more — nearly five times the dog's lifetime wellness costs.
• Consider accident-only policies, which cover injuries but not illnesses and can be considerably less expensive. ASPCA would charge $35 a month for its accident-only plan, a price that doesn't increase with age. You must pay monthly premiums, but you may or may not have to pay deductibles and co-pays, depending on your pet's health. So it may be worth it to cut your premium costs by increasing your deductible, reducing the percent reimbursed, and choosing an annual limit of only $5,000 or $10,000 instead of unlimited. These are standard insurance cost-reduction tactics, but be aware that they increase your risk of future vet bills.