IGX

Posted: **Mon Jun 30, 2014 4:57 pm**

Others may know this but it was a surprise to me.

About 18 months ago my dog got glaucoma in one eye, leaving it blind. They recommend an anti-glaucoma med for the other eye, since it often follows a second eye within a couple years. Eye-drops from vet or Walgreen's, $70. From CostCo, $15 dollars. Same med.

So, when she got lethargic and the fancy-pants vet we were referred to with an ultrasound machine found a mass on her spleen causing internal bleeding, we were told we were looking at $3500-$4000 to remove it, it needed to be done immediately since it could hemorrhage, and it wouldn't necessarily fix her. 2/3rds of the time the mass is malignant, and the dog dies from cancer within 3-6 months. 1/3rd of the time the dog is just fine afterwards.

Since her life expectancy is 4.5 more years, and my EV is 1/3 of that, I'm not paying $4,000 for 18 months of dog. Love my dog, but not doing that. But then I realize we've been transferred to a fancy pants emergency facility in the north suburbs. Perhaps there are other vets that don't charge as much.

I take the dog home that night and make a few calls the next morning that are further away. First vet will do it for $1200 - $1800. Second for $560. Of course, I'll have to drive an hour to Fox Lake instead of a half hour, but my time is worth less than $1,000/hr.

I've heard that the reason vets have gotten so expensive relative to 20 years ago is that consultants came in and basically said, "People love their dogs. Make this place look more like a doctor's office and charge way more." I've known a few people who (stupidly, in my view) spent several thousand dollars using a nearby vet to try to save their pet. Despite that, some places are still doing things the old way, particularly in markets that serve horses and other animals where owners are far less likely to be overly sentimental.

In any event, it's definitely worth shopping around for anything that gets beyond a couple hundred bucks. I hoped to find this for under half the cost, but had no idea there was 80%+ potential savings in cost.

Posted: **Mon Jun 30, 2014 5:14 pm**

My dogs vet won a couple million in the lottery and kept her rural clinic open on a pt basis. I almost felt guilty paying her reduced fees that resemble what I imagine prices in the 1980's were.

Posted: **Mon Jun 30, 2014 5:54 pm**

We go about 12 miles outside of town in order to save 70% on in-town prices. Dog recently had some sort of messed up stomach/diarrhea and was expecting a serious bill with expensive medicine, the vet prescribed pepto-bismol. Problem solved.

Posted: **Mon Jun 30, 2014 6:04 pm**

The problem is a boom in supply (that is, vets) and a decline in demand (namely, veterinary services). Class sizes have been rising at nearly every school, in some cases by as much as 20 percent in recent years. And the cost of vet school has far outpaced the rate of inflation. It has risen to a median of $63,000 a year for out-of-state tuition, fees and living expenses, according to the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges, up 35 percent in the last decade.

This would seem less alarming if vets made more money. But starting salaries have sunk by about 13 percent during the same 10-year period, in inflation-adjusted terms, to $45,575 a year, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. America may be pet-crazed and filled with people eager to buy expensive fetch toys and heated cat beds. But the total population of pets is going down, along with the sums that owners are willing to spend on the health care of their animals, one of the lesser-known casualties of the recession.

Today, the ratio of debt to income for the average new vet is roughly double that of M.D.’s, according to Malcolm Getz, an economist at Vanderbilt University. To practitioners in the field, such numbers are ominous, and they portend lean times for new graduates.

“We’re calling for more bodies coming through the veterinary educational pipeline at higher and higher cost at the very point in time that we need fewer and fewer,” says Dr. Eden Myers, a vet in Mount Sterling, Ky., who runs the Web site JustVetData, where she crunches numbers about the profession. “And they are going to get paid less and less.”

For years, the veterinary medical association contended that the United States needed more vets, not fewer, especially in rural areas. To support this view, in 2007, the organization helped underwrite a study, hoping to bolster a call for government assistance to help meet a putative shortfall of 15,000 vets by 2024.

The results, released last year, came to a strikingly different conclusion. Titled “Assessing the Current and Future Workforce Needs in Veterinary Medicine” and conducted under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, the study found little evidence of vet shortages. It also concluded that “the cost of veterinary education is at a crisis point.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/busin ... 19&gwt=pay

Good call.

Posted: **Mon Jun 30, 2014 10:09 pm**

Grandpa's Spells wrote:Eye-drops from vet or Walgreen's, $70. From CostCo, $15 dollars. Same med.

Generic drugs are sometimes cheaper if you don't have insurance at all than they are if you have insurance that doesn't cover them. I've saved money by reminding pharmacists that my dog was uninsured.

In any case, I'm sorry to hear about your dog.

Posted: **Tue Jul 01, 2014 5:26 am**

We had a family dog that had something impacted in his intestine and was dying. Our country vet recommended going to the fancy pants clinic for surgery at $2,500. I asked how much she'd charge....$,1,200. We did the $1,200 and all is well.

Posted: **Tue Jul 01, 2014 10:47 am**

Just had to intervene with an owner who was going to put his dog down because this otherwise happy healthy dog had elevated alkaline phosphatase levels and the vet said he needed a test and medications that would cost thousands of dollars. Getting a second opinion on Thursday. I strongly suspect a scam.

Posted: **Tue Jul 01, 2014 12:56 pm**

my wife takes our dogs to a pricey vet. he is careful and good, but there's is no way she will stint on dog care. the dogs rank well above me in the famlly hierarchy, perhaps for good reason.

IGX

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