When "fur babies" grow old, a 50,000-yuan tumor treatment checklist has given rise to pet cancer insurance.

At the end of August this year, Mr. Zhao's Shiba Inu "Wangcai" was diagnosed with lymphoma.

"At that moment, I made up my mind to treat Wangcai." said Mr. Zhao. But when the pet hospital handed him a treatment cost list exceeding 50,000 yuan, his heart still tightened.

"I have been with Wangcai for more than 10 years, and I can't bear to see it tortured by malignant tumors." Mr. Zhao said.

As director of ZhongAn Insurance's pet insurance product department, Li Shuang noticed that pets born during the "pet ownership boom period" (2015-2019) are gradually entering their middle and old age, and the diagnosis and treatment demand for diseases with high incidence in elderly dogs and cats such as tumors has surged accordingly; however, in the face of the high cost of pet tumor treatment, many pet owners who are short of money can only watch their "fur kids" suffer in pain helplessly.

In Li Shuang's view, the pet insurance industry is currently ushering in a new round of transition — upgrading from "whether it exists" to "whether it is good".

"This inspired us to start developing the first domestic pet anti-cancer insurance." Li Shuang told the reporter of *The Economic Observer*.

Data from *2025 China Pet Industry White Paper (Consumption Report)* shows that the aging of domestic pets is intensifying, with the proportion of elderly dogs and elderly cats reaching 27.6% and 10.1% respectively. Among them, the proportion of elderly dogs has increased by 6.4 percentage points in the past three years, and the proportion of elderly cats has risen by 3.8 percentage points, leading to a rising risk of pet tumors.

In response to this market demand, a number of insurance companies engaged in pet insurance business have begun to lay out pet anti-cancer insurance, regarding it as another driving force for the continuous growth of the pet insurance market.

The Economic Logic Behind Pet Anti-Cancer Insurance

Previously, Mr. Zhao had purchased a pet insurance policy for Wangcai, but the single compensation limit was only 1,500 yuan.

He inquired with the insurance company whether he could claim compensation according to the standards of critical illness. The insurance company stated that in accordance with the relevant additional critical illness claim clauses of this pet insurance policy, he could only get a one-time payment of 10,000 yuan.

"The 10,000 yuan compensation is only enough for the initial diagnosis cost of lymphoma, and other treatment costs have to be figured out in other ways." said Mr. Zhao. Due to unstable work, he has not saved much savings. After failing to borrow money from relatives and friends, he plans to borrow money from banks or Internet financial platforms to treat Wangcai.

He said that Wangcai has accompanied him for more than 10 years and brought him full of happiness. What he can do now is to give it a "wonderful old age".

Li Shuang said that the diagnosis and treatment burden of elderly high-incidence diseases such as tumors and kidney diseases is becoming an unavoidable problem for pet-raising families.

"The first question is whether pet-raising families have reserved enough funds in advance to treat their fur kids for critical illnesses such as tumors." Li Shuang said. Calculated based on the clinical charges of leading pet hospitals and the claim data of insurance companies, the average cost of the complete diagnosis and treatment cycle of pet tumors reaches 50,000 yuan, of which the cost of a single operation ranges from 5,000 yuan to 20,000 yuan, and the cost of a single special diagnosis such as pathology and imaging also requires several thousand yuan, not including other expensive treatment costs such as targeted therapy. However, most pet-raising families are not prepared for this. Faced with this high expenditure, many pet-raising families are at a loss for a while. They want to treat their beloved pets but are unable to afford it, which makes them very distressed.

The reporter learned that there is currently no independent special pet tumor insurance in the pet insurance market, and the relevant claim liabilities are mainly embedded in general pet insurance products as additional items. There are problems such as low insurance amount, limited compensation ratio, and strict exemption clauses, which are difficult to cover the high expenditure of pet tumor treatment.

"Our original intention of developing pet anti-cancer insurance is to fill this market gap." Li Shuang told the reporter.

As the business supervisor of the product innovation department of a large insurance company, Liu Yan is also actively promoting the research and development of pet anti-cancer insurance.

Liu Yan told the reporter that the reason why insurance companies are determined to develop pet anti-cancer insurance comes from two aspects: on the one hand, it comes from the voices of the vast number of pet insurance policyholders — pets spend their whole lives accompanying their owners, and when they enter old age, a comprehensive medical care becomes their most gentle responsibility to their pets; on the other hand, the insurance company internally believes that the increase in high-incidence tumor diseases in elderly dogs and cats will become a rigid demand for pet medical care, and it is also an opportunity for insurance companies to expand the scale of their pet insurance business.

"We also plan to package pet anti-cancer insurance, general pet insurance and personal health insurance, and take the family as the unit to create a one-stop family medical security plan for humans + pets, covering the full-dimensional medical security needs of the family." Liu Yan said.

However, in the process of developing special pet tumor insurance, insurance companies are facing multiple challenges.

Different types of elderly dogs and cats have different high-incidence tumors. For example, Corgis are prone to lymphoma and breast tumors; Golden Retrievers are prone to soft tissue sarcoma and mast cell tumors; Shiba Inus are prone to lymphoma and melanoma. Insurance companies need to conduct extensive data analysis and actuarial calculation to determine the diagnosis and treatment claim scope of high-incidence tumors for different types of dogs and cats, and ensure that the overall claim risk is controllable.

Li Shuang told the reporter that through data analysis and actuarial calculation, ZhongAn Insurance's "Pet Anti-Cancer Protection" covers more than 30 high-incidence tumor diseases for different types of dogs and cats.

In addition, insurance companies also need to ensure that after the policyholder receives a large amount of compensation, the money is used to treat the pet instead of being diverted to other purposes, which will increase the risk of "insurance fraud".

Li Shuang said that in terms of compensation payment, ZhongAn Insurance has built a direct compensation model, that is, users do not need to advance the operation fee and diagnosis fee, and the insurance company directly settles the relevant fees with pet hospitals and third-party dog and cat tumor diagnosis institutions, ensuring that the compensation is used for pet tumor diagnosis and treatment.

How to Prevent Moral Hazard

In the process of designing pet anti-cancer insurance, Liu Yan found that insurance companies are facing another challenge — how to implement accurate diagnosis and standardized treatment of tumors in elderly dogs and cats, so as to ensure that the operation model of this new type of pet insurance is sustainable when the single claim amount often reaches tens of thousands of yuan.

Liu Yan said that the current low accuracy of pet tumor disease diagnosis and non-standard treatment methods are easy to leave loopholes for some pet hospitals. She learned from a number of pet hospitals that in the diagnosis and treatment of malignant tumors in elderly dogs and cats, some pet hospitals in order to make more money, often increase the use of drugs with insignificant curative effect to obtain more treatment fees and compensation; even a few pet hospitals treat benign pet tumors as malignant tumors, fabricate critical illness conditions and defraud high compensation.

Li Shuang believes that to properly solve these "moral hazards", insurance companies must abandon the extensive batch entry mode of cooperative pet hospitals, and instead carry out in-depth cooperation with targeted cooperative pet hospitals and third-party authoritative pathological testing institutions to further implement accurate diagnosis and standardized treatment of dog and cat tumors, so as to achieve a new balance between effective treatment and claim cost control.

To this end, ZhongAn Insurance has selected H-LAB Animal Reference Diagnostic Laboratory (hereinafter referred to as H-LAB Laboratory) as its pathological testing partner, which is responsible for providing accurate diagnosis of dog and cat tumors and giving standardized treatment suggestions.

"The reason why we chose H-LAB Laboratory is that this institution has independently developed dog and cat-specific biological reagents and antibodies, and has built full-stack capabilities for accurate diagnosis of dog and cat tumors from the protein, cell to gene level, avoiding cross-species errors of general laboratory animal and human reagents. It can help insurance companies clarify the molecular type of dog and cat tumors, and completely avoid insurance fraud behaviors such as forging pathological reports, fabricating illness conditions, and exaggerating tumor classification." Li Shuang said.

Zhang Yiyi, founder of H-LAB Laboratory, told the reporter that the current domestic dog and cat tumor diagnosis and treatment mainly faces three major pain points: first, most pet hospitals generally use human and common laboratory animal antibodies in clinical practice, which lack specific verification for dogs and cats, leading to misjudgment of dog and cat tumor classification, resulting in high diagnosis and treatment costs with poor curative effect; second, most pet hospitals do not have the ability of gene mutation screening and professional interpretation, causing a large number of sick animals to miss the opportunity of accurate treatment; third, the dog and cat tumor molecular report only gives the mutation result, without supporting targeted/immunomedication guidance, leading to the disconnection between diagnosis and professional treatment.

Focusing on solving these pain points, on the one hand, H-LAB Laboratory has built a large domestic dog and cat immunohistochemical antibody library, covering all clinical scenarios such as dog and cat tumor classification identification, targeted concomitant treatment, and prognosis assessment. By connecting data with insurance companies, it eliminates the occurrence of claim fraud incidents; on the other hand, it cooperates with ZhongAn Insurance and other insurance companies to build a full-process service from dog and cat tumor pathological screening, standardized treatment plan setting, clinical medication guidance, to pet owner communication, so as to promote the effective transformation of test results into standardized treatment plans.

"We also hope to use the pet anti-cancer insurance claim payment as a lever to guide the pet tumor diagnosis and treatment industry to develop towards standardized diagnosis and treatment and reasonable charging, gradually solve the industry pain points of opaque charging and inconsistent diagnostic standards, and promote the standardization construction of dog and cat tumor diagnosis and treatment." Zhang Yiyi said.

Li Shuang admitted that ZhongAn Insurance is planning to take pet tumor diagnosis as the fulcrum to continuously improve the security system covering the whole life cycle of pets.

"At present, the overall penetration rate of pet insurance in China is less than 3%, which is significantly lower than the 10%-40% of mature European and American markets. This means that among the 126 million domestic pets, only about 4 million are insured, and more than 90% of pets are still outside the security coverage." Li Shuang said. To fill this gap, the function of insurance needs to undergo a new transformation — it is not only a tool to share the risk of pet medical expenses, but also an important link connecting pet owners, pet hospitals, pet medical testing and health management services. In the future, how to further improve product adaptability, medical service capacity and risk pricing capacity will be an important direction for the next stage of development of the pet insurance market.

Whether this new type of pet insurance can create the scale effect of premium is also attracting market attention.

Li Shuang is not worried about this. Through extensive market research before, he found that young pet-raising families, pet owners of breeds with high tumor incidence (such as people with Teddy, Golden Retriever, Corgi and other pet dogs), multi-pet families, and high-net-worth single pet-raising people all hope to transfer the expenses related to high-incidence tumor diseases of elderly dogs and cats to insurance in advance to solve the risk of large expenditures.

This article is from the WeChat official account "The Economic Observer", written by Chen Zhi, and authorized for release by 36Kr.