I'm surprised that a med student would fall into this line of thought too... "I pay way more money for vet bills than I do for my own medical care!" Less than 5% of pets in the U.S. are insured, so vets have to deal less with insurance companies not paying out and more with clients skimping out on bills, trying to barter with you, or saying that if you don't treat their pets for free then you must not really love animals.
Malpractice insurance is indeed
important in vet med, and becoming moreso as pets are treated more like family. We also have to worry about being the one that misses the diagnosis of the zoonotic disease, or not catching Foot and Mouth disease during a cattle health inspection. Not to mention vets that work on multi-million dollar racehorses and the like... huge liability concerns there.
We are not allowed to do that either... Not that it doesn't happen sometimes, but it's illegal to hold someone's property hostage, even if they haven't paid you for services rendered.
Anyway, we do have a handful of former MDs/med students at my school, including one guy that went to med school under the pressure of his parents, became a successful practitioner, then quit to go back to vet school and will graduate with no student loans since he paid his full tuition with money he got from being an MD. The jist I get from them is that med school is more intensive detail-wise, while vet school covers a much wider breadth (companion animals, food animals, performance animals, public health, etc etc). Both are hard and take lots of work and dedication.
One perk of being a vet student versus a med student is that I get to do my first surgery next week, as a second year
🙂 Wee!