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Prices – What and Why
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Be honest, you have wondered at least one of those questions when you have taken your cat into the vet. While there may be a few unethical veterinarians out there that give the rest of us a bad name, you will find that in pretty much any profession. If anything, most veterinarians, including us at All Feline Hospital, tend to far undervalue our services because we got into the profession to help animals, and we want to do whatever we can to help your cat, even if it means losing money. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have to pay our own bills though. To become a veterinarian, a person must go through 2-6 years of undergraduate college and exit with good grades in some very hard classes. They must compete with tens of thousands of students across the country for only a few thousand openings. They then attend 4 years of intensive study at a veterinary college, most often taking around 22 credit hours a semester, and studying most of their waking hours. The cost of this schooling is equivalent to a human medicine MD degree. However the average veterinarian makes only a third to half of what an MD does. We are not saying you should feel sorry for a veterinarian because they make much less, they went into the profession with their eyes open. However, there is a reason why they need to at least pay their bills and cover their overhead, even though they would love to be able to fix your cat without having to charge you for it. Most veterinary clinics barely keep their head above water, but they keep doing it the same way because they love being able to help fix your pet.
While we got into the profession because we enjoy medicine and the challenges it presents, that doesn’t mean we want your cat to get sick. Our goal is to preserve your cat’s quality and longevity of life as long as possible. We don’t like to see cats that are hurting, we hurt for them. We are here because it does happen, but we will do our best to prevent it. That may include doing preventative healthcare testing, because we are not psychic, and cannot always tell what is going on with your cat just by doing an exam.
So, we will start with a physical exam and a history, and see if that leads us into a certain direction. Based on what direction we are led in, we may want to do some basic testing such as blood work, an x-ray, a urinalysis and a blood pressure. Those four things are considered pretty standard as a basic work up. That doesn’t mean we will do them all, we will do one at a time, and based on the results, move onto the next one. If we keep coming up with negative results, but your cat is obviously sick, then we will keep going until we find an answer. Depending on what is wrong with your cat, yes, it can get kind of expensive. That is why we either talk to you first about what we want to do in your appointment, or have you fill out a consent form outlining what you will allow us to do if you are dropping off your cat and will not be present while we are going through the process of diagnosing your cat. It is hard to have our hands tied because inexpensive tests are not giving us an answer, and you cannot afford additional testing. However, we will make the best of what we have and make our best educated guess as to what is going on with your cat, if we are not able because of financial constraints to continue testing until we have a definitive diagnosis. Not ideal, but real world.
But why do we charge what we do for each service? What kind of markup do we use? Much less than in human medicine, we guarantee you. There is not a set scale for what veterinarians will charge. Most commonly, we will look to see what our neighbors charge, and charge something similar. The biggest thing is we need to make enough to cover our costs, and believe me, there are a lot of them. But, we also want you to be able to afford to come and see us. So, for common services, we may charge a price that results in us losing money, like the cost of an exam or office visit (you wouldn’t think so, but for the time involved, we lose money on those services), but charge more for something like a vaccination or a surgery cost. In the end, it all equals out to a very narrow profit margin, and sometimes not in the black. Again, we are balancing trying to help your cat, with being able to keep our doors open.
But, enough about why, now onto what – our actual prices. On the next few pages we have our common service prices, our routine surgery prices, and estimates for our most common advanced surgeries and medical issues that may require your cat to stay with us for several days. |
Once your cat does get sick, we will approach it in a systematic way to determine what testing we may need to do that will give us the most information. Yes, we would love to run every test under the sun – it would make our job a LOT easier. We will sometimes watch television medical shows and see the doctor order about 10 different tests, and think gosh that would be nice to have all of that information for diagnosis. But, we can’t do it for free because we have bills to pay, and you can’t necessarily afford to pay for a ton of tests. 