So there’s a vet clinic in the area that my parents swear by. They’re a fairly big practice for the area, employing about 3 or 4 vets. They do both small and large animals and do both boarding and grooming as well. So a pretty wide variety. But I was suspicious that they might be ‘money grubbing’ for lack of a better term. My dog needed neutered a few months ago and the local vet I prefer was booked for two months. This vet however was able to get him in in a week so I decided to give them a try.
Now as a bit of background, years and years ago (like 15) I went to school to become a vet tech. I wasn’t in the field very long, maybe 5 years total but I do still remember quite a lot about how things work. Not even getting into the fact that this clinic was one of MANY in the area that refused to do any spay or neuter before the animal was six months old, something I know is outdated, I was wary about it in general. My first red flag was when they insisted on me bringing him in the day before the surgery to stay overnight. Apparently this was so they could prep him right away in the morning. Ok, that’s kinda dumb since every other place I’ve been with has had people just bring the pet in early on the day of surgery. But then, they insisted that he stay overnight AGAIN the day of surgery for ‘recovery’. Look, neutering isn’t any fun for the dog but it’s not fucking major surgery. Even so, if you’re doing your surgeries so early in the morning it necessitates an overnight stay the night before, that gives the animal plenty of time to recover before you close at six that night. I tried to get them to agree to let me pick him up that night but they refused. Since he was starting to display some undesirable traits that I didn’t want sticking around because I had to wait months for the other clinic I just went ahead and did what they asked.
Anyway, skip forward about six months and he stops really using his rear left leg. He doesn’t seem to be in any pain and just hops around on 3 legs most of the time but runs just fine. So I take him in, again since my local preferred vet’s not open on weekends I can’t use them now that I’m working. The vet tech comes in, gets his history and vitals and asks if there’s any financial concerns. Because, as she put it, the vet was going to advise the most expensive things first. Nice way to start the visit. Vet comes in, we figure out the problem is in his knee. Since he’s a small dog the chance is very high that it’s a luxating patella, basically his knee cap pops in and out. Ne suggests some x-rays to start, to make sure it’s not something like a torn ligament and he’ll draw up a quote for me. So I wait, and in comes the tech again with the quote. For one x-ray…one view of his knee… $500 fucking dollars. I couldn’t believe it. Looking at the breakdown, the x-ray itself was only $90. Reasonable and about what I expected. But they were insisting he had to be fully anesthetized (he didn’t) and that because of that he’d have to stay overnight (he didn’t). But the biggest thing adding to the bill, was a $200 charge to send the x-ray to a board certified veterinary radiologist. What the ever loving fuck. I have NEVER seen a vet that doesn’t read their own x-rays, especially for something as simple as a damn knee problem. When I asked the tech about it, mentioning that it was a bit ridiculous that they were doing that, she said the vets weren’t trained to read x-rays and that it was a specialization. My ass. At that point I was done. Because even if I spent $500 on this and it confirmed the obvious, there would be nothing to do about it. You can’t fix this sort of thing outside of very expensive surgery and most dogs are perfectly fine living with it. When I told them I was going to go home and think about it, they then tried to sell me a $60/month bag of supplements for his leg.
Seriously, I am never going back there again. I’ve never been more disgusted with a service in my life.
Yep, money grubbers. And you’ve got some knowledge about veterinary care. Imagine how these people play on less savvy pet owners who are worried about their animals.
At the vet I used to work at, x-rays would run around $150. That’s the cost of the x-ray itself plus a sedative. How deeply the animal needed to be sedated depended on the individual animal and how wiggly it was, but there was a flat fee attached to that. We’d do them early in the morning and they were recovered enough to go home around 3-4 in the afternoon. The vet read the x-ray himself and if for some reason he wanted a second opinion he’d drive it over to another clinic and have another vet double check it. If I recall, he paid the other vet a fee for their time but didn’t charge the client anything.
Spay/neuter, teeth cleanings and other surgeries worked the same way, drop them off early morning and 9 out of 10 would be recovered enough to pick up by late afternoon. Once in a blue moon there would be an elderly one that took longer to recover, and we’d keep that one over night just in case.
FWIW, we never ever did surgeries for luxating patella. Many dogs live with it just fine, although if the dog seemed to be in pain from it we would refer them to a veterinary surgeon about an hour away who does specialty things like that.
I felt that way about one vet I used to use, like I was just being put through my paces to keep handing over money. It’s especially frustrating when you don’t have any training in the field because they are the expert you need to trust and it’s hard to know if you are really being taken advantage of or not. I finally just moved on to a new vet, like you are doing, and have not had that WTF feeling since.
A few years ago now, my Mum went to a supposed ‘reptile specialist’ vet for a chameleon that she thought was egg-bound- it clearly had eggs, you could see them, but it seemed to have been carrying them too long, and the local vet had said they weren’t sure of the best course of action. The ‘specialists’ started off by trying to stroke it to calm it down (chameleons are somewhat legendary in the reptile world for hating this, they go into full stressout mode).
They then tried to scan it… in a scanner designed for horses. According to my Mum, the picture they got looked like porridge, you couldn’t even tell which bits were lizard and what was just background, and neither could they. They did manage to produce an x-ray, and gave her the result of “We think it has eggs”.
They then tried to bill her a crazy amount, when she got it itemised, it included something like £200 for the porridge picture and £100 for ‘injections’ of which it didn’t have any. She did pay for the x-ray and a consultation fee, but flatly refused to pay the rest. The chameleon died shortly afterwards, as the eggs has calcified and it was unable to lay them.
And I thought the vet specialty center where I work was expensive. Our radiology department reviews all x-rays done by all the departments. I’m in Emergency which is open 24/7 and of course our own doctors interpret the xrays as they happen, then they are scheduled for review Monday, or the next day whenever done over a week night. The exception is when it may be a foreign body or hard to determine pathology - in those cases they get sent to another offsite specialty radiology service that’s also open 24/7, which interprets them within 30 minutes for an extra $90.
Automatically estimating/assuming sedation is outrageous. We ALWAYS try to take the xrays first, and don’t ask for sedation unless the pet is just impossible to hold in position - even then we’d be more likely to give a pain medication that just makes them drowsy and happy (or at least less pissed) than full sedation that would take recovery time. That’s unnecessary, and dangerous if we suspect they may need surgery which would be another sedation.
Xrays themselves are almost always three views, right and left laterals plus a ventral-dorsal - whether thorax, abdomen or extremity, those are $180 + $45 for in-house interpretation (which does not delay immediate diagnosis, ever) and if they need to get sent to the offsite service then the $45 is waived and $90 charged instead. So for 3 views digital x-rays you’re looking at generally $225 and $270 at most. And of course client gets copies burned onto a disc for them to take with them.
This is a practice with more than 40 doctors, including emergency and critical care, surgery and orthopedics, internal medicine, specialty dentistry, neurology, oncology, rehabilitation, radiology (which includes MRI and ultrasound), cardiology and I’m sure I’m missing something! If any place in Chicago could get away with charging $500 for one xray I’m sure it would be us. But we don’t because that’s outrageous.
Yeah this place is just ridiculous. They have surprisingly good reviews though all the bad ones they have are centered around pricing. I was talking to my parents about this too, because they take their little poodle to them as well, and apparently they got quoted $1600 for a dental cleaning!!! That’s absolutely outrageous for those who don’t know. When I was in the field it averaged about $500 for an uneventful cleaning. Granted this was over 10+ years ago but it also was in the heart of rich snob California. I’d love to see the actual itemized quote justifying that for a tiny five pound poodle with no obvious need of extractions.
I’m tempted to leave them a google review but I don’t even know what to say that doesn’t sound petty. What really gets me is that they must do this to everyone and get away with it most of the time. People love their pets and to see these vets use that to get into their wallets just disgusts me.
I have known people to pay several thousand dollars for medical care for a very old, ill pet and even the same to find out exactly why a beloved old, sick pet died. Without being there at the time, I couldn’t swear that the pet owners didn’t insist on it. But it does make me wonder if some vets are pushing to bilk people who are grieving, which seems very unethical.
Had a dog wig out choking and staggering. I rushed her to the vet ER and she sedated her, scoped her. She was obviously feeling bad, but they didn’t find anything. The interesting thing is she was terrified at the vet. Hardly seemed to recognize me, cowered at all the scary city noises. Even getting her in the car to go home she was panicky, trying to jump out of the car. She sat there the whole ride home, trembling and panting. This is a rather bold doberman mix. As soon as she got home, she was fine - no sign of anything wrong at all.
2 days and $1000 dollars later and she seemed to have the world’s most expensive tummy ache. With a panic attack thrown in for good measure.
What I wonder is, why aren’t humans’ medical costs inline with veterinary costs? $225 for an immediate xray and interp at a 24/7 emergency clinic? Yes, please.
It might seem outrageous for Fido, but for Grandma it would be a gift.
I had a beautiful Border Collie puppy, we took him for the vet for his neutering. The vet commented that the puppy had an odd walk. He said “I think he many have an issue with his hips. I’ll do an x-ray after he is sedated. You may want to hold off if it’s serious.”
He didn’t call. After the puppy was in recovery though, he called us to tell us the puppy’s hips were drastically malformed, and the dog would require over $2000 worth of surgery, be in incredible pain for two years, and may eventually walk normally."
We made the incredibly tough decision based on the two years of pain and that the surgery was, at best, a long shot anyway, to put him to sleep.
Then we received the bill for the neutering. The vet had done it anyway
That’s easy, we can refuse service. Payment at time of visit and deposit required if pet is left for hospitalization or procedures. Very little of what we do goes unpaid. Human hospitals all have to take up the slack somewhere. Fluffy shows up in diabetic crisis with DKA and a heart condition and needs 5 days of hospitalization plus specialists to stabilize enough to go home? We can absolutely do that. Can’t afford the $7,000? We can euthanize for under $300.
Grandma gets the treatment anyway, and everyone else gets the bill.
Too many vets have gone the corporate route - from the openly-corporate ones like VCA to individual practices who decided that a big staff, minute billing practices and a standard billing routine was preferable to, you know, actually caring for the animals and their owners.
Something in me hates corporate vets more than I can hate corporate human medical providers. I won’t claim anything rational about it. If you aren’t in it for the animals, don’t be a vet. Period. Sorry it cost you $300,000 to get through UC Davis. You should have been a day trader instead.
Wait, you’re saying that after you got the bill you realized that the vet had done the hip surgery? Do you think they did it before even asking you, or did they do it after you made the choice to euthanize the poor pup? (Either way is awful, but for different reasons.)
There was no hip surgery. Just the neuter and xrays. Vet should have just done unsedated xrays before even booking the neuter, IMO. Instead, they sedated the dog first and did the 5 minute neuter at the same time as the sedated xrays, then still charged for the neuter even though it wasn’t necessary.
But if we can do a hip surgery on a dog for a few thousand dollars ($2000 is the quote mentioned above for some extensive sounding hip surgery), why can’t we do a hip surgery on Grandma for a few thousand dollars? (US average for a hip replacement is in the ballpark of $40,000.) Meat is meat, and bone is bone. If anything, a veterinarian’s expertise and equipment has to be more variable than a human doctor’s since dogs and cats and hamsters and chameleons are all sorts of different shapes and sizes.