>veterinary surgery is so much cheaper (i.e. affordable to ordinary people) than human surgery....

..."in the USA". At a guess, I'd say it's the complete opposite in Europe with it's pesky human healthcare systems.

To be fair, human surgery also costs a lot in Europe. It's just not paid by the patient. It's not healthcare in itself that is free but health insurance.

It also costs less.

How many European doctors make more than $500k / year ? The average orthopedic makes roughly that (https://www.kaptest.com/study/mcat/doctor-salaries-by-specia...)

And that's a huge problem. All our doctors (Eastern EU here) are leaving for UK, US, or richer western EU countries. To resolve that, we have a law that requires newly graduate doctors to stay and work here for a long time (10 years here IIRC), which is rightly seen as a serious issue wrt. their personal freedom. That pushes people away from pursuing medical degrees.

It's cheaper, but that has its price too.

> All our doctors (Eastern EU here) are leaving for UK, US, or richer western EU countries

To be fair. That's true of educated people in general, not just doctors.

I can't fully agree. I think the situation is much better than it used to be and is improving, for example IT workers are not universally leaving anymore, a lot of them now stay and there are many foreign people coming here! There is now an exciting startup sector too, and the international corporations are finally building IT hubs here. But it keeps getting worse in the medical sector because of that law and because it's not paid well enough given the long hours and stress.

Nowadays, older doctors (those who have served their 10 years) are moving from insurance-based to cash-based treatment because they demand much more than the "pricing tables" dictate - so there's a lot of doctors around you, but you can't go to them because the "public" insurance can be used only where they accept it, they never give you cash. The prices are very similar to US hospital quotes - in absolutes, not PPP. Meanwhile, we still have the "public" healthcare providers (these are corporations, but usually wholly or partially owned by political entities), but the quality is getting worse, they are unable to keep it stable, much less improve - not surprising since they rely on essentially forced labor.

I've actually paid less for a private X-ray (in the UK) than it cost for my cat at the vet. Vetinary drugs are also often more expensive than their human equivalents.

I suspect scale may be a factor here.