Your 7-year-old, indoor-only house cat is in generally good health, but will probably need dental work in the next several years. Your snake, once a foot long, is now a 6-foot boa constrictor and still growing. And you consider your 1-year-old Border Collie puppy a member of the family.

Do you need pet insurance?

It depends. In response to requests from the Cornell community, the university has just begun offering pet insurance to staff and faculty through Marsh@Work Solutions, the same vendor that offers home and auto insurance. The pet insurance carrier, Veterinary Pet Insurance (VPI), is a stable, nationwide company with a very straightforward plan: you take your pet to any veterinarian, pay the bill and submit the bill to VPI for reimbursement.

Determining whether this insurance is right for you and your pet, however, will be a less straightforward, highly individualized decision -- one that may differ even between the pets you own.

It depends, in part, on your perspective on pet insurance. If you've rushed your animal to the emergency room in the middle of the night, you know that the price tag to stabilize the animal, run tests and hospitalize the animal is very expensive. So perhaps you view pet insurance the way you do fire insurance on your home -- as an annual expense for each insured animal to hedge against a catastrophe you hope will never occur.

If, however, you are hoping to save on your overall veterinary bills, you will want to go to the Marsh@Work Solutions Web site http://www.personal-plans.com/cornell/ to access VPI Cornell-related information and do some number-crunching of various scenarios.

At the VPI site, you will notice that coverage is so individualized that you need to plug in some basic information about your pet before you can determine how much the insurance will cost. The cost will vary by the age of your pet or how long you have had it (exotic birds are not covered for the first six months of your ownership, for instance); whether you choose the VPI Superior Plan or the VPI Standard Plan (you can be reimbursed a greater dollar amount per expense under the Superior Plan); and whether you sign up for the optional well-care protection, which covers such expenses as annual physicals, routine preventive care, dental procedures, vaccinations and spaying.

Other considerations:

Suppose you choose to cover your cat, age seven, using the VPI Superior Plan. That coverage would cost $19.75 per month.* If you choose well-care coverage (vaccinations and routine care), add $8.25 per month. Your payments would be $28 per month or $336 per year. That seems like a lot, but the cost of dental work might well exceed that.

Or suppose you are covering that boa constrictor, age 4. The avian and exotic pet plan would cost you $16.50 per month or $198 per year.

Because your dog is young, you might decide to go with the VPI Standard Plan, at $11.08 per month and the well-care vaccination and routine care coverage, at $8.25 per month, for a total of $232 per year. For an animal that is part of your family, you might decide the cost is worth it, even if you need to stretch to make it. (Of course, if you decide to cover all three animals, your totals per year would be more than $700 per year, minus a 5-percent discount for multi-pet insurance).

Enrolling in VPI insurance is totally up to you. You do not need to enroll during this open enrollment period, April 21 through May 2. You can enroll at any time, or you can choose not to enroll at all.

If you have pet insurance questions or if you do not have access to a computer to run various scenarios for your pet(s), contact Marsh@Work Solutions at 1-800-553-4861.

*All figures are approximate, based on hypothetical examples, and may not reflect exact quotes.