Tierärzte müssen möglicherweise Preise für gängige Haustierbehandlungen veröffentlichen

This is a step in the right direction, Private Equity seems to be buying large numbers of practices for the sole purpose of raising prices for treatment.

I booked my dog in for a teeth clean last week. She has it done every year. I got the estimate through yesterday: £947.

The year before it was £400. The year before that, £290.

Turns out my vets is now owned by private equity.

One thing people don’t realise is that Vet pricing is very much like taking your car to a mechanic. For some things, like a brake change, it’s a known quanity. The price of parts is known, the time of labour is known, and there’s very little to go wrong when the job is started so any quote will be pretty accurate. This holds true for many things at the vet like vaccinations, nail clipping, or basic dental work.

But just like if you take your car to the garage and say „my engine is making a weird noise“, there’s a huge chunk of Vet work that is unknown. Just like a mechanic could open the bonnet and find the issue in 30 minutes costing you a small labour part and a pack of new washers, they could also open the bonnet and find you need an engine rebuild.

The difference with Vet work is that when they „open the bonnet“ and go in for surgery, with an estimated cost to that, if something changes, or something extra needs doing, they can’t wait 6h for you to reply to a message about additional costs, nor can they just close up, refuse to give extra meds leaving your pet in pain or dying because you only approved a £600 budget.

With Vet work you’re not always paying for an outcome at a fixed cost, you’re paying for time and materials and those are highly variable.

Corporate Vets (the companies, not the staff) do take the piss, that no one can deny, but people do fundamentally misunderstand how Vets actually work.

Wanted to do an MRI scan of my cats brain and spinal cord. The estimate came back to £4,000. I knew it was going to be expensive but my god

Where’s the competition ? If prices have got ridiculous because of private equity investment you would think individual vet practices would step in and undercut them ?