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When your cats are healthy, paying their bills is not a strain. The shots are kind of expensive but it's only once a year, and spaying and neutering are of course one-time expenses.
Where you are going to run into trouble is if the cat is a) hit by a car; b) in a really bad fight; or c) gets feline leukemia, toxoplasmosis, or some other disease that requires a lot of 'hospital time' (boarding at the vet's while they take care of her).
If you can stand to do it, probably the best cat 'health insurance' policy is to make her an indoor cat. That cuts down on her exposure to diseases, motor vehicles, wild animals, and so forth. However, that won't necessarily save her, as we unfortunately know.
A long time ago, our cat Theenie stopped eating. We took her to the vet's, where they determined that she had hepatic lipidosis. This is something that happens to cats when they don't eat, and it is a serious danger for them that we hadn't known about: if they go without eating even for a couple of days, they start 'feeding' off the fat in their liver, and of course that will eventually kill them. The problem with hepatic lipidosis is that after it sets in, the cat won't eat again because it makes her throw up; she just keeps consuming her own liver until she dies.
So basically without treatment your cat will starve to death once it develops HL. The only treatment for HL, at least when it happened to our cat, is to feed the cat through a tube while restricting her motion so that she stops consuming her own liver and gets used to food again and will eventually eat on her own. However, it usually takes several weeks of more or less constant treatment to get her over this, and there's where the big bucks came in.
We found out eventually that what caused all of this was that Theenie had eaten a piece of ribbon from a balloon we had around the house and it had gotten wadded up in her digestive system somehwere so that food couldn't get through. After a while at the vet's she barfed it up and we thought after that she would improve; and for a while she did. But after we took her home, thinking she was better, she took a turn for the worse, and we ended up having to euthanize her anyway, after having blown between $1000 and $2000 on her care.
From my POV, the lessons of the story were these:
1) Watch your cats closely for signs of strange behavior. Cats are evolved to conceal illness and will not show obvious symptoms of being ill until things have advanced to a pretty desperate stage. If we had noticed her eating less earlier we might have been able to save her.
2) Don't let them eat stuff that's not food and don't leave tempting stuff that's not food around where they can get to it.
3) Animals are extremely demoralized by long illnesses/treatment in a way that humans are not because they don't understand it and you can't explain it to them. It was very striking with Theenie. She was all right while she was at the vet's, and we figured she would make it; but once she got home, she just lost the will to go on, and I think it was because while she was at the vet's she was basically figuring, "OK, as long as I'm in this weird alien environment clearly I have to be probed, but once my owners rescue me I'll be OK," and once she found out that she would have to keep going with the tube feedings even after she got home she had just had it. We feel like she basically told us that she was done and it was time to let her go.
So, IMHO,
4) Most forms of treatment that will involve several thousand dollars, unless it's some kind of surgery that you can do once and then heal from, is probably not worth it from the cat's point of view.
For instance, based on this experience, I would never treat a cat for cancer. Our other cat died of cancer--again, we didn't know he had it until the autopsy because he concealed the symptoms until very late--and we are both glad that he was able to run around and lead his normal life right up to a day or two before he died, instead of having to go through chemo, radiation, etc. Diabetes, on the other hand, well, if you don't mind giving the shots, I don't think the cats mind it too much.
So I guess the upshot is that the insurance might be a good idea if your cat is an outdoor cat and liable to get injured, but otherwise I would be inclined to just take your chances and hope nothing happens to her like what happened to Theenie. I think if we had it to do over again, knowing what we do now, we would just have euthanized her right away. As much as we love them, animals are different from humans, and I think at some point you have to ask yourself whether you're putting them through the treatment for their sake or for yours.
Good luck,
The Plaid Adder
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