@ajs513 interdasting. I'm cynical and pessimistic and see insurance companies and the billing/coding/reimbursement game in human med and the lobbying to keep them in power between patient and doctor as a massive inefficiency. The secretive BS where you bill $1000 for something that's literally $100 then adjust downwards to "pre-negotiated group rates" and do all sorts of quid pro quo back scratching... it just makes me disgusted quite frankly.
What I've seen (and personally experienced) with the Direct Primary Care model (look it up!) in human med is that by eliminating insurance companies and administrators and lots of overhead, the doctor actually takes home more and the patient can spend less, and they both have more time per visit. At least in a primary care/GP setting. And often times rates for office visits, labs, imaging, etc. are cheaper than the traditional "insurance company is gatekeeper god" model. Like $200 MRI vs. $1000 MRI. Everybody wins except the insurance company, the billing and coding and compliance administrators that you no longer have to pay to comply with gov't suffocation, etc.
There's a human med surgical center in Oklahoma (?) that has all their procedure rates public on their website. Up front. No BS games.
Where I'm going with this rambling is while I sympathize and wish more clients would see their pets as family members, I don't see the finances of middle and working class Americans improving in the coming years but either stagnating or getting worse. While on the surface I'm sure group plans and group risk sharing that comes with insurance in the traditional definition (like car insurance, life insurance, i.e. for BIG events) can increase revenue (as opposed to the human med definition where insurance is the end-all, be-all, even for routine office visits and immunizations), I worry that if vet med follows the same pathway as human med, it'll lead to the same clusterfudge issues in human med where massive, greedy insurance megacorps insert themselves between patient/client and doctor, hurting both. Do y'all have to swim through CPT codes and ICD codes and hire more administrators to play those games?
I do see tuition, room & board rates on similar levels to human med and human dental med rates leading to very similar levels of massive six-figure debt. I almost wonder if it'll be more feasible for the federal government to stop providing such "easy free money" to students that'll force schools to actually lower tuition rates and fees. I don't see this happening except through an act of Congress that forces Congress to re-think how they create more base money/currency via creating federal loans out of thin air.
On second thought, the pessimist in me thinks we're too far gone for even that approach, since student loan creation out of thin air is another way to increase base money.
So this post focused on just two factors:
1. Lower debt up front: Lowering the ease of federal loan money inflating the real cost of education - requires Congress, the Federal Reserve, and universities to all play ball?
2. Increase revenue/income on the back end: Either by a change in mindset in the middle and working class to spend as much on pets as they do on family or lowering overhead by getting rid of excess... but doesn't vet med already have the luxury of largely not being grabbed by the proverbial balls by insurance companies and administrators?
Any of y'all know any old/retired vets in their 60s or 70s+? Decades ago school didn't cost nearly this much. If we plotted vet med tuition over time and plotted suicide rate over time, is there any correlation between just those two?
Is time and feeling overworked from a large census a major factor? In other words, are there less vets per capita in 2020 than in 2000? 1980? If there's a shortage, would increasing the supply of vets allow to more breathing room in one's workday --> less stress, burnout, and depression?
Sorry for rambling and bringing this all up, especially if there's already 500 threads talking directly about this stuff.
