Part 1: Why Are Veterinary Bills So High?
Veterinary bills are high for lots of reasons that I will go over in this post. As you will see there isn’t just one factor that causes veterinary bills to rise higher, but several. On this list you might be surprised at some of the reasons.One of the first reasons for rising veterinary bills is veterinary clinic consolidation. Every year more and more private vet clinics are bought out by large chains like Banfield and VCA.
With a corporate ownership of a veterinary clinic, prices are raised to the highest level a community can tolerate. These chain store veterinary clinics train the people who work there to get the bill as high as possible.
In fact the clinic with the highest gross, or the clinic who sells the most pet wellness plans is usually given an award each month.
In these clinics it is hard for the veterinarian to direct treatment on their own. It can also be hard to establish a personal relationship with a veterinanian there, because the corporation often rotates veterinarians. Another reason is there seems to be a high turnover of veterinarians at corporate owned veterinary clinics.
Another reason why veterianry bills are so high is because of veterinary practice consultants. Consultants are becoming more and more common in veterinary medicine. The primary reason why a clinic would hire a consultant is to raise revenue. So the easiest way to do this and to justify the high consulting fee is to tell the veterinarian he/she needs to raise their fees.
One way a clinic determines how much they can charge is that they find out what the average income is of the households that live in a 3 to 5 mile radius of the clinic. So if you live in an expensive area, your vet clinic will charge you more. If you live in a poorer area you will be charged less.
Another reason why veterinary bills are so high is because of expensive equipment. It seems every year technology advances at a quicker and quicker pace leading to more advanced medical equipment. One example of this is the ultrasound.
Ultrasounds were unheard of in regular vet clinics a decade ago, but now almost everyone has one. In order to pay off this expensive peice of equipment they must raise thier fees.
