Going on the basis that you're here truly in good faith to learn from the inside why costs are increasing:
Simply put, capitalism. Veterinary care is paid out of pocket by the pet own, pure and simple no different than how I pay out of pocket for my mortgage, catalytic converter, and groceries. There's no subsidizing it on the front end. So the cost of care is dictated by what the market is willing to bare, no different than anything else.
This is even more true for veterinary emergency medicine. 75% of emergency and specialty practices are owned by corporations, which in turn are owned by venture capital, private equity corps or other similar business models. The entire *point* for those companies is to make year-over-year increases in income. The majority of C-suite folks in these companies are actually paid on bonuses that are a percentage of the year over year yield. Here's a YouTube video that describes how these companies work regardless of industry:
So, what does that mean for those of us at the bottom of the totem pole? Well, it means that, for now, veterinary medicine, particularly specialty and emergency medicine, is a numbers game. And let me tell you, that vibe is real. My hospital group is owned by a PE corp. Our original hospital was purchased during the pandemic pet surge when we were making millions per month, literally. We opened two more hospitals since 2022. Now? Losing money. Quite literally, my hospital is 165k in the hole as of May 1, and it's likely worse now. We're nearly 2 million dollars below targets that the corporate relays to us across all 3 hospitals. So what's happened? Across 3 hospitals, we've lost 10/21 doctors, our operations manager, a practice manager, multiple assistants and technicians. We've lost more than 10% of our staff since May 1. All due to corporate upheavals. We've had to close at least one of our hospitals 4 times overnight in the last 2 weeks because we don't have staff to fill the holes.
The problem? Cyclical to a certain extent. They built our struggling hospital in the wrong location by about 1 mile east and 1/2 mile north. The clientele difference is probably from 150k/year household income vs 60k/year. So the hospital is hemorrhaging money because they built it in an area that cannot afford an emergency veterinary hospital. And it's not that we are necessarily too expensive as a whole; we're one of the cheapest ER groups in the whole metro area I'm in. It's that some areas cannot sustain veterinary care financially. This has been a problem in rural America for decades where there's one vet for 250 square miles because that's what that area can financially support. The difference now is that the urban and suburban areas are going to experience the same for a different reason.
We're already feeling the effects in vet med. Many urgent cares owned by VCA have been closed after being open only 2 years. Blue Pearl is reducing costs for surgery and hospitalization by 20-30% and closing hospitals. More privately owned hospitals in my area are opening urgent care slots and hours and hiring doctors and staff specifically for that purpose (but not 24 hour hospitals).
We've already hit on another point: labor costs. The doctors in my practice are some of the worst paid in the area. However, that is partly because our techs are some of the best paid (if not the best) techs in the entire area. How much do you think an emergency technician should be paid? How much should a doctor be paid? In comparison to human medicine, technicians are paid 1/4-1/2 of what human nurses are paid; doctors are paid 1/3-1/2 of what human doctors are paid. I haven't had a raise in two years, however (I'm asking for one this week). And yet, I have the same level of student loans as a human doctor, and technicians still have between 30-50k in student loans for an associate degree. My student loans would be 1400/month if I was paying them right now (currently in forebarence); 550 of that is just my interest, FYI. My students loans are $8.75/hr if you look at them from the perspective of how much I need to earn to cover them.
I get your frustration. Trust me. Cause I'm the one euthanizing these animals every single shift. So I have at least one of you every day that I get to talk to about this same exact thing. And this is why the average vet is in ER med only 5 years and technicians leave the industry entirely on average in 5-7 years.
However, it's not my fault, nor my technician's or practice manager's fault. We are all hourly employees (my practice is unique in that doctors are hourly rather than salary). I am no different in level of power than the person checking you out at the grocery store.
Things will change. It's just going suck for now for everyone. What can you do to help? Go to a private practice as a client and buy everything from them, including your prescriptions. Every dollar kept in a private practice is a dollar not given to a VC or PE corp, including folks like Chewy.
Until then, good luck. Do preventative care. If something happens, get checked sooner rather than later.
Now, a few points:
Human MRI costs are between 400-12000 depending on the body part and location you're at. And humans don't need anesthesia. Anesthesia alone for a full body MRI for my pitt bull would be 1000 alone since a full body MRI takes 2.5 hours for her size of dog. So that's a huge part of it.
And I personally have had such negative experiences with vets - even specialist vets don't seem to be able to get the diagnoses right despite exorbitant costs.
Serious question: how is any doctor, human or vet, going to be right 100% of the time? That's not realistic just based on statistics, let alone in medicine. My dad was hospitalized for the entire month of Feb 2024 after a stroke event (250k bill, by the way; no way a dog would *ever* have that high of a bill for any reason). And they never figured out why he had a stroke at 57 and his GI doctor didn't realize he had an extra luminal obstruction because human doctors don't deal with a lot of obstructions in general. I called it as an obstruction 5 days because he was diagnosed because I see it every day.
It's even harder in animals because they can't talk. That's the big factor here. And we have a lot less research and knowledge.
