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Notes -
Why did you get insurance with a co-pay of 50%?
Insurance is good if it prevents improbable but huge payments. It has a negative expectation value on your net worth, but should have a positive expectation value on the logarithm of your net worth (presumably defined inclusive enough that the case of going negative does not appear), which is closer to actual utility. LW recently had an article on this, here.
A fixed co-pay seems reasonable enough, the case you want to avoid with insurance is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, and if you co-pay is a few thousand, then that limits your risk exposure.
But an insurance with a proportional co-pay feels different. I mean, if it is 1% co-pay, one could still argue that it scales the treatment options one can afford by orders of magnitudes. By contrast, a 99% co-pay would not be worth it for anyone, because if you can afford 99%, you can also pay 100%.
I would argue that 50% co-pay is more like 99% co-pay than 1%. If X is the maximum loss you could absorb, it will only be helpful for losses between X and 2X. For example, say you could absorb losses of 5k$ without insurance. Then for any treatment which ends up costing up to 5k$, you would have been better off to just absorb the losses in case they appear without paying a middle man. And for everything which costs more than 10k$, you could not afford your co-pay and thus would not benefit from insurance. Now, if it happens that most vet bills are in that range, then it could still make sense to buy it, but from my priors, they are likely much wider in distribution.
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