Frankly, if a vet can, as a matter of practice, afford to do procedures probono but only if the owner surrenders their pet, it means they are making an absolutely staggering profit from those who are emotionally extorted to pay. That is predatory.

I miss the days when vets got into the business to run small practices for a reasonable profit and middle class lifestyle. Few of them wanted mercedes money . It's kind of gross to think modern vet medicine is making vast sums off of pet owner's worst days.

Surrenders their pet to someone who can pay

You sound like you don't personally know many vets, you don't know what it was like to operate a vet practice back in the day, and you don't know what they drive.

I do, and going on about this (incorrectly) on an article about a veterinarian suicide crisis is unseemly. This isn't about you. If vets are so greedy and amoral, why are they committing suicide, for all the reasons listed in the article, at 4-8 times the rate of the general population?

You might find it interesting and beneficial to learn more about this topic firsthand. Vet practices, shelters, and vet schools often operate in coordination and are always looking for volunteers and donations. You may find more understanding and empathy with more exposure to the people this area.

You think you should dictate the price of someone else’s labor, and that is less predatory or somehow better than someone being able to price their own labor?

I can't 'dictate' anything. I just think that healthcare, for both humans and animals isn't the place for a 'the price is whatever the market will bear' mentality. That mentality assumes the participation of cool, rational actors. People making healthcare decisions for their family or pets do not fit that criteria. I feel it's immoral to use the love one feels for their pets to extract as much as possible from the owner.

I understand you probably feel differently. Frankly you and I will probably not ever agree on this topic as we have different world views.

Me myself? Absolutely not.

But yes, labor should have some means to be controlled for price, so that people cannot be underpaid or overpaid (as many are).

What is the formula for determining underpaid and overpaid?

The formula is what the master says you get paid.

"Tell me how to create a perfect society right now, otherwise you cannot critique this one."

You proposed implementing price controls to “appropriately” allocate society’s resources.

Unless you have specifics, what value does your proposal have? It is trivial to wish for world peace.

Did I wake up in another world where this is a legislative body? We're all just posting our opinions. Just because you don't like mine doesn't put a higher burden of effort on me to post.

I'm sure no amount of specifics would convince you that's a good idea, just as no amount of your specifics would probably convince me otherwise. And that's fine.

I am under no obligation to provide you "value" in my posts.

"Hey, you can't afford to care for your pet. I'm willing to spend several thousand dollars of my own money, but there's likely more care in the future, and I'd like to ensure the animal then lives with somebody who can afford any future care"

"You predatory monster!"

Do you think even for a moment through what you're saying, or is this just reflexive on your end?

Also, in what world is a median annual income of $100k, for a job with expensive and long training, "mercedes money"? If you have actual evidence of most vets making "vast sums", maybe it'd a good time to share that.

If you are referring to the story in the article then I believe you misunderstood. The vet didn't perform the procedure pro bono; the owners gave the pet up to someone who was able to pay for the procedure.

I don’t know a single vet that drives a Mercedes. I know a lot who drove beat up trucks and have a mountain of debt.

* FTC acts against private equity firm's acquisition of veterinary clinics[0] * Private equity is buying everything from vet offices to tech conglomerates [1]

I'm not opposed to people making money and having a comfortable life, but the fact that private equity is capitalizing on vet clinics is telling.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31728350 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36313967

Private equity companies frequently purchase struggling businesses, not prosperous ones

Maybe, a local monopoly could be a cause for concern. But is the barrier to start a veterinary practice so high as to grant them a permanent monopoly?

In this specific case being discussed, it does seem the vet business was acquired by a PE company a few years ago:

https://www.mainebiz.biz/article/portland-animal-health-star...

Note that the vet doctors themselves may have ownership in the company itself.

The other option is that advanced surgeries for animals are so costly, and the proportion of people who have the ability to pay so low, that there does not exist sufficient demand for a new vet to want to open a new hospital. In short, pet owners simply cannot afford all the pet healthcare they want.

> I assume you must be an expert in the cost structure of operating a veterinary practice in that location, at that time, in order to determine a predatory and non predatory price.

You don't have to be an expert when you can compare vet prices in US and in other parts of the world. And unlike human healthcare, vet is not subsidized anywhere, so the comparison is fair.

With the price tag of 10K$ I'd say it would be worth to take a flight to Mexico, other LatAm countires, or even Eastern Europe to pay tenth of the price for the same operation.

Comparing prices in different locales makes no sense, especially in an un-arbitrage able scenario like time sensitive emergency surgery.

What if tort costs are higher in one country than another, requiring higher insurance premiums? Real estate is more valuable, resulting in higher rents/mortgages? Labor costs higher due to more stringent labor laws/less supply of labor. The list goes on and on.

I considered this for my pet's medical care. I did some things at a very expensive private equity owned bay area vet clinic, and other things at a much cheaper location quite a drive away. The bay area clinic wanted 4x as much for a relatively routine procedure. But they also had new and more advanced imaging equipment and monitoring equipment, and veterinary surgeons with fancier degrees and specializations.

I wholeheartedly disagree. After seeing the prices of basics like saline in hospitals, I'm not surprised to learn of inflated prices obfuscated from the general public.

That one is obvious due to us knowing the hospitals sell to the government and insurers for much less.

As far as I am aware, this does not apply to a veterinary business. The article also says it was $10k for emergency services at a vet hospital, including the aftercare.

What are the labor costs of having highly qualified people, presumably in low supply, on call to provide these services? What are the costs of supplies like medicine, and malpractice insurance (if that applies)?

The vets that I've been too (minus a non-profit clinic I went to once) absolutely charge outrageous amounts for saline and other things. It's a hard business, so like most time-of-use sales points they take advantage and charge for the convenience. I'm not making a value judgment, just pointing out that it definitely is something they do.

What is definitely something they do? Asking for higher prices in high demand low supply scenarios? That is something (effectively) everyone does.

It is how the world works. It is the mechanism which the markets use to signal more supply of something is needed (or less demand).

If you want me to study advanced biology for 10+ years and then have me work at odd hours of the day and night to be ready to perform surgery, you need to pay up, or reduce the other options I have for earning money which give me a higher quality of life.

Again, I'm not making a value judgment (as rationalizations from both perspectives can be made, and a person's opinion will depend on their perspective), just saying that "charg[ing] outrageous amounts for saline and other things" is definitely something they do. In a free market system they're allowed to charge whatever they want, and the consumer is allowed to take it or leave it. But explicitly stating the practice is a fair thing to do.

How much of that 10K would be Mercedes money ?

It goes without saying that a vet should have higher than average income considering the length and cost of study and responsibility etc. Not at all trying to say that they're greedy.

Not sure why this goes without saying.

More training. More required expertise. More investment - opportunity cost, schooling, etc. The mental/emotional burden.

Because in the US, higher education is largely a personal investment against future earnings, and vets have longer and more expensive education requirements that most jobs, so they need to have higher salaries to justify the initial investment and to incentivize people to pursue that career path.

Non predatory thing then is to help the owner to put the pet down painlessly and quickly for reasonable price. Without guilting the owner into 10000 operation.

I do not see any evidence of guilting.

> The incident involved a four-month-old German Shepherd puppy who'd swallowed a skewer and needed emergency surgery life-saving surgery. The cost of the complicated procedure and after care was close to $10,000 – more than the owner could afford. As a last resort, to avoid euthanasia, the clinic offered her the option to surrender the puppy to a new owner who could cover the cost.

What is a reasonable price? Unless someone is familiar with pricing from multiple vendors for some period of time, how could one know a reasonable price?

Is a million dollars a reasonable price? The point I make is that you might not be able to tell a reasonable price, per se. But you can generally tell an unreasonable price. It's some x-rays, animal quality anesthesia/meds, and labor. It's hard to see how this reasonably adds up to $10,000.

Were time not an issue, they could probably take a trip to Mexico, get the operation done for maybe a few hundred dollars, and come back home, all for much less money than the vet was asking. And the reason I think that's particularly relevant is that it's not like the underlying costs really change. It's like what led to the creation of SpaceX. Elon was wondering why it cost billions of dollars to launch a rocket to space whose materials cost a negligible fraction of that. And it turns out there was no answer, which is why SpaceX dominates space launches now.

> Is a million dollars a reasonable price?

If you can’t find someone else to sell to you for less, then yes. Barring broken markets such as due to regulatory capture, etc.

> The point I make is that you might not be able to tell a reasonable price, per se.

>But you can generally tell an unreasonable price.

These strike me as conflicting statements, otherwise I don’t know what per se means.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37846041

> And the reason I think that's particularly relevant is that it's not like the underlying costs really change.

>So developing world costs tend to give you a 'raw materials' cost, where all that's left is labor + profit.

Why are labor costs not underlying costs? How about liability insurance? Real estate?

Markets can break not only on the supply side, but also on the demand side. When consumers become unaware or uninterested in the baseline cost of what they're purchasing (or in econobabble - when the price elasticity of demand approaches zero), you end up with grossly inefficient markets because companies lose any incentive to meaningfully compete on price.

The point of looking at 'raw materials' cost is that if the costs on top of said raw materials becomes more than the cost of doing business elsewhere (such as in a different country), the one would be wise to do just that. This is the whole reason things like medical tourism exists.

It's not like other countries are getting their machines, medicines, and so on for that much less. It's just they're able to reduce the cost of everything on top of raw materials to the point that one can afford to take a 'holiday' half way around the world, get their issue fixed, and make it back all for less, often vastly less, than it'd cost to do stateside.

I have to imagine that a skewer in the squishy parts could result in a wide range of potential injuries. Maybe the specific injury here was just an “x-ray and pliers” kind of job as you suggest, but suppose this particular skewer skewered one or more organs, or resulted in some kind of awful hemorrhage or something. I could just as easily imagine the sort of injury that would require intricate surgeries and a lengthy hospital recovery, implying the round-the-clock attention of a number of specialized humans with mouths to feed and other career prospects (including patching up human animals instead!).

Euthanasia might be the only humane option in an x-ray-and-pliers outfit not staffed and equipped to perform such an heroic sort of intervention in the timeframe it would take to succeed.

One thing that does stand out to me is the extreme shortage of people willing to become veterinarians, even at these prices. It seems like regardless of the pricing on the retail end, capable young people considering modern veterinary life are sizing up the entire financial, emotional, educational, and lifestyle bargain and not finding the payoff to be worth it.

That said, I am sympathetic to the idea that modern veterinary practice has strayed too far from the way it’s done in lesser-resourced settings. Maybe it is more appropriate to set aside advanced and expensive medical techniques in favor of more cheaply-educated practitioners, more conventional business hours, simpler tools and supplies, more frequent recourse to euthanasia, and so on.

The blessing and the curse of modern medicine, no? It’s bad enough to have to face death when it feels inevitable, when “all that can be done to save them” is relatively simple and well-understood. Knowing that the same situation might be survivable under different circumstances—with more money, or in a place with the right practitioner, or if we’d just had this particular exotic antivenom in stock, or if the line had been shorter that night, or if we could hire some bioengineers and a lab to custom-tailor a treatment to puppy’s genes… the same death then comes with a lingering feeling of guilt over the possibility that more could have been done.

You're creating a false dichotomy. Animals swallowing things, being hit by vehicles, attacked by other animals, jumping from 8 story buildings (and living), and so on all cause similar groups of internal injuries - often life threatening. Yes it requires expertise and work to treat them - that's exactly what the job of a vet is. It's not like you go to a vet in the developing world with a puppy suffering severe internal injuries, from whatever reason, and they just shrug and ask if you want to euthanize.

Quite the opposite I expect you'd see dramatically less euthanasia in the developing world (though a quick search unsurprisingly turned up very little in the way of data). But I think the logic should be clear enough. Pets make everybody's lives better and more enjoyable, but very few people could afford to even think about dropping $10,000 on a puppy. Those prices are just a fast-track to mass euthanasia and depressed vets.

> It's some x-rays, animal quality anesthesia/meds, and labor. It's hard to see how this reasonably adds up to $10,000.

You should open a vet office then. Sounds like you’re well equipped to undercut competition and still make a hefty profit!

Or maybe you’re just making things up. Because we’re talking about an emergency open and close surgery to remove what’s probably a long sharp object with puncturing of the stomach. On a small animal. On immediate short notice (cancel everything else!). It’s going to be difficult with multiple doctors. And it’s going to require a lot of post surgery care.

My partner and I have a number of animals and volunteered at a shelter for many years pre-pandemic. We worked with vets and vet techs and are roughly aware of the associated costs.

$10,000 feels high at first glance but consider the size of the skewer compared to a small animal. There is likely damage done to other areas including major internal hemorrhaging which is not super straight-forward to track down completely (even in humans). If the skewer was single-use bamboo (which I suspect given how much wood will retain food smell and how puppies love destroying garbage cans), the puppy would have likely chewed on it a bit causing splintered mess internally.

This would result in a multi-hour procedure with at least 2 surgical staff (surgeon and tech) and anesthesiologist (due to the complicated nature of this, we can’t have the animal regurgitating as well as active life support monitoring). In addition to the standard tools, they would be using X-rays, dyes, internal (dissolvable) sutures, etc. Internal organs would be mended, stomach fluid would need to be removed from the abdominal cavity, and there would be at least 12 hours of monitoring post op.

Expensive, yes, but I don’t think it’s that unreasonable unfortunately.

I think your guess here is pretty much spot on.

TFA links another article explaining the $10,000 bill is a combination of $3,000 of completed tests the original owner had already paid, the surgical procedure, and aftercare costs.

TBH, the only part of that which sounds high is the $3k for pretests. But I don't know what all had to be done, so I'm just guessing.