08/31/2025
There is currently some very nasty things being said about us on Facebook over a patient that needed surgery, but the owner was unable to afford it.
I will not go into great detail about this case to protect the privacy of the owner, but unfortunately the patient died overnight. This saddens us greatly to hear this.
Of course, we will be the bad guys because we do not accept payments plans for large unexpected expenses. We do offer 3 different financing options, which can be used right away, just for situations like this. We will be the bad guys because we were the last vet to see this patient when 2 other clinics also saw this patient. I will not name them, but one charges almost double what we do for the same surgery.
What people don’t know is that we spent time calling every clinic that was open on a holiday weekend within a 3hr radius to see if anywhere was cheaper than we were, just to find out that our surgery cost is the cheapest. We also did not charge this owner anything for our time just to save them some money to use towards surgery, because every dollar counts.
I advised the owner to crowd source to get help from the community, because we have had great success in the past with this method, and not a single donation was made, but now people come back and say how terrible we are for not allowing payment plans.
When I opened the practice, I tried to be different, and take payment plans, only to find myself struggling to pay the bills because no one ever adhered to the payment plan. They would cancel their cards, even change their phone numbers.
Of course, we had to stop accepting them, and be like everyone else.
Has the cost of veterinary medicine continued to climb over the recent years… yes!! It is up 60% in some cases. I absolutely hate this. No one hates this more than the people working in this field. When our distributors, suppliers, and reference labs increase their prices, we have to also.
Everyone thinks that veterinarians are rolling in money… so let me break down some of the expenses for you:
Payroll weekly: $20,000
Supplies weekly: $10,000
Lab Costs Weekly: $6,000
Imaging Costs Monthly: $2500
Other equipment Monthly: $4,000
Building costs Monthly: $8,000
Insurance/Licensing Monthly: $2,000
What is not included in this list: IT/marketing, employee bonuses/retention, uniforms, building maintenance/repairs, continuing education, and any other unexpected expense that presents itself over the month. Trust me when I say no vet is sitting on a pile of cash.
If there is one thing that i hope people can gain from this post it is that emergencies happen. Your pet, just like a human can have unexpected things happen to them where they will need care. It is every pet owners responsibility to financially care for their own pet, not the vet hospitals. I wish for nothing more than to have an unending supply of money to be able to pay for all of my expenses, and also fully care for every patient that is presented to me. If you think that the people that work in this field don’t hate the “money factor” more than anyone, you would be wrong. Any time a patients care can not be gold standard because of money, we break a little more on the inside. We lose sleep every night thinking of all the patients we saw that day.
We do our best everyday with what the owners can do, but we can not take on the expenses for every patient. If we did, there would be no clinic to come to, there would be no life saving medications on the shelf, there would be no x-ray machine to diagnose anything, there would be no blood machines that can get us rapid results when we need them, there would be no IV fluids to stabilize the dehydrated, hypotensive patient, there would be no where to go when your pet had an emergency. What would happen then? How many lives would be lost? Emergency hospitals are shutting down all over this country because they can not be staffed due to high burn out rates among veterinary staff.
My advice… have a plan financially, have pet insurance, watch your pet like a hawk so they don’t eat things they aren’t supposed to, keep them on a leash, or in a secure backyard to they don’t get hit by a car, know the common toxins and keep your pet away from them, watch them like their life depends on it, because sometimes it does.
