AIBU VET BILL £5700

[bellewilson]

Long story apologies- We own a beautiful Exotic cat she is one year old. Perfectly healthy took for one year vaccinations and she had a bad reaction temp and loss of appetite and started getting wobbly on back legs after 6 days. Obviously back and forth to local vet but when became wobbly local vet suggested she was better off being assessed in local veterinary hospital. Take her there (have insurance with £4k limit was supposed to be their top of range superior plus policy) vet hospital assessed her and said we need to admit her for tests and suspected neurological FIP (cat coronavirus) sedated her and did X-ray and scans and biopsies of fluid found in chest and abdomen and blood tests. Only had her in for 24hours and bill was £3150 took a week to finally get results as positive for FIP carrier with low probability of infection which means with her ongoing symptoms they think she has neurological FIP. So as now 7 days later our cat has got more poorly not eating or drinking having to syringe feed/drink. Re-admitted to hospital and they agree to only do minimal care to keep her comfortable whilst antivirals drugs kick in (drip and appetite stimulation) and would cost max £280 a night admitted for 3 days and everyday checked with vet the bill and costs and how much left on insurance. Collected today to be told owe £5700 so £1700 over insurance. Was expecting £600 max but £1100 more than I was told on the phone several times is a joke. Ask for bill breakdown and it’s CF at its best and laughable they can actually get away with it… from working it out the initial £3150 they have charged approx £1400 just for sedation to do the X-ray £450 and ultrasound £680 plus extra for biopsy and tests plus nursing care and £450 consultation. I made it completely clear to them we couldn’t afford a large bill and they agreed all along to do a direct claim with our insurance company and get pre authorised payments from them through a portal. Turns out didn’t do that either so if insurance doesn’t pay we have to. What can we do. I have Googled and average cost for Anastasia for a cat is £300/400 in Uk so how can they charge 4x the average cost. AIBU? Any advice please so stressed.

Many vet practices are now owned by private equity funds because they can add a lot of profit especially with most owners having insurance. Added to inflation it’s meant prices have sky rocketed

Sounds like a standard bill from a referral hospital. Your insurance is too low. Both my cats are insured to £15000.
If we didn’t have the NHS people would know how much healthcare actually costs and there would be less vet bashing. Veterinary treatment is expensive. As it should be

My dog has run up multiple large bills, his insurance pays £10k a year, we've got close!

Some of the costs seem really high eg the sedation. They don’t involve particularly ground breaking or expensive care. I can understand scans are expensive due to equipment costs. Vets are obliged to let you know a treatment plan and the likely costs of that and agree it with you. If they didn’t do that you can complain to their registration body. Some of the care eg fluids and encouraging eating you probably could have done at home or got subcut fluids

So 20% of the vets bill is VAT
Of the net charges 40-50% is staff salaries.
20% is drug cost
20% building rent, utilities etc
Another 5% charges, insurance etc
That leaves 10-15% to reinvest in new equipment and profit.
My small practice has spent over 25k on new equipment this year.
Specialist hospitals will have more expensive staff, large facilities with greater overheads and the equipment is more expensive.

1980.....yes and a can of coke cost 20p then, you can't possibly compare prices with those from 40 years ago!

It's a lot and I sympathize but am getting a bit weary of people wanting state-of-the-art health care for their animals and not wanting to pay for it. Health care is expensive everywhere. It's not cheaper because the patients are animals.

By exotic do you mean flat faced cat? If you do, anesthetizing a flat faced animal can be more complicated, and therefore presumably more expensive.

@GCalltheway I hope you're joking that you think £35 p/h is a reasonable hourly rare for a vet? Is this assuming they get no cut of treatment fees? Because I charge £50p/h for 1:1 tuition for gcse maths students, and I have only trained for 4 years, and am not responsible for the life of anyone's pet if I get it wrong!

We have pets. We have excellent insurance. Our vets are amazing (and charge very fairly from experience - 2 of our pets have lifelong conditions with daily meds all covered every year bar the excess, and routine checks also charged fairly) Definitely worth more than £35p/h!

I think some chain vets do take the piss and they are incentivised to maximise business profits. I always use independents now. I would challenge them over the anaesthetic costs.
Also, as a side I was reading something the other day about the costs of common operations on the nhs and was surprised how ‘cheap’ they seemed compared to some vets costs. I’ve copied one from 2018, can’t find the one from the other day.

According to the Royal College of Surgeons, is is the price for the most common surgeries:
• Hernias (abdominal) – £1,190 to £4,360
• Hip replacement – £1,342 to £10,741
• Knee replacement – £5,591 to £8,325
• Gall bladder removal – £3,601 to £5,160
• Tonsillectomies – £982 to £1,100

The costs involved with advances in medical and veterinary science (as with all sciences) are astronomical. Science subjects to study nationally, don't cover their costs and are propped up by all other subject areas in education. It's a very expensive business.

But it doesn't excuse informed consent or insurance companies taking the pee!

One of the biggest, nicest houses in my area is owned by a vet who runs an animal hospital. Tennis court, pool, it's worth millions.

This

This.

These situations are what everyone will be experiencing with the 'NHS needs privatising' bollocks.

I AM taking into account inflation. So 35-40 years ago a vet bill for £20 is now £280-£300, when in reality, taking into account inflation, it should only be about £70-80. They have increased exponentially, and ludicrously, like house prices.

OP, I think the main problem is your insurance which seems quite low despite them insisting it was the premium package.

Also, the majority of vets now are owned by one of 3 huge companies, driven by targets and run essentially for maximum profit. Vets working for these companies don't make the wages you think they do. This coupled with the fact your cat required neurological investigations/specialist care has probably been an expensive combination.

I'm really sorry to hear about your cat and I hope they make a full recovery.

I do wonder whether, as the cost of living crisis/inflation/interest rates continue, we will see more people unable to afford care for pets even if they beloved family members.

Seems a sad day when pets become a luxury item

Some of the costs seem really high eg the sedation. They don’t involve particularly ground breaking or expensive care.

Have you ever looked at healthcare costs for these things?

www.nuffieldhealth.com/hospitals/derby/pricing

I just want to make a general reply to a few of the comments on here, then probably won’t check back in, as there’s no point me keep explaining things/it does get tiring reading the vet bashing posts. I know not everyone is vet bashing - but plenty are.

Costs have escalated over the years for lots of reasons - care standards have gone up. The person saying they haven’t is wrong. I’ve been qualified for 10 years, working in GP practice and our care is streets ahead of where us was ten years ago. Drip pumps, multi parameter monitors, better nursing/in patient care, multi modal analgesia is utilised much more, just to mention a few things. We can’t really offer a budget ‘no frills’
option for the clients who want to pay less (some things are advised, but optional), but standards of anaesthesia for example has improved significantly, so it would be wrong to withhold that to cut costs for some patients. Owners have higher expectations and are less happy for a GP vet to ‘give something a go’ that they are fairly competent at, I refer more things out than I used to - partly to cover my arse.

Costs cover all the overheads as well, registered nurses (years ago, it was acceptable to just use lay staff, now very few practices do this), receptionists, buildings etc. all the drugs we stock ‘just in case’ that then go out of date. We purchased a new ultrasound scanner recently - much better diagnostic quality images, and more options of probes, so hopefully can keep more ‘in house’, but it cost over £40,000. That money has to come from somewhere!

the person who says about hourly rate for a vet - and someone saying £35ph. I wish! I’m a director of a two branch practice, managing around 40 staff, work 45 hours a week, including weekends on a rota basis, have been qualified ten years and hold an advanced post grad qualification and I don’t know earn quite that. So none of my vets who are ‘just’ vets come come. Our nurses are generally on £11-14ph depending on experience (and that’s up including head nurse). Our costs have gone up to try and increase staff salaries to living wage, not min wage, to offer our staff two weeks sick pay, rather than SSP, a (mildly) better maternity pay that SMP…all things which I know some
industry’s don’t offer, but many do.

So it’s far from money in the vets/staff pocket, it covers so much more, so please try and bear that in mind when so many of you are quick to criticise us of ripping you off.

Sounds harsh and brutal, but I agree. To pay anything over 3 figures for an elderly cat (15-16 or more,) is batshit.

One vet we went to when our old girl (17) was struggling to poo, and wee, and was losing weight rapidly, and whining a lot, suggested she may have cancer, and she needs a 3 month course of treatment. She needs to go away for it, and it would be around £9,000. Vet suggested this without even knowing what it was!

I wanted to laugh at how utterly fucking ludicrous it was. Spend £9,000 on a 17 year old cat who is clearly nearing the end of her life?! LOL yeah right! And how the fuck she thought we had £9,000 to fork out for vet fees just baffled me. It was just after the first covid lockdown and MANY people were struggling financially. Bloody vet must have lost some work with the lockdown and wanted to recoup some money!

And imagine sending her out to some strange fucking lab to be experimented on?! I said a flat NO, and if she has not improved within 3-4 weeks, she can be PTS. She was clearly suffering, and yet they wanted to use her as some kind of experimental trial to make £9,000 from. Jog on.

She did not improve, she got worse, and we took her to a different vet a few weeks later, who suggested PTS immediately. Said she had liver failure. Any vet who expects the owner to spend multiple 1000s of £££ on an elderly pet is taking the piss, and DOES intend to rip them off.

One of the reasons why i have never vaccinated my pets and they have all lived (cats and dogs) to 14+ never needed a vet and have had no chronic health issues.

I have grown up on a farm, where the animal would have been put down. These days its hard to know if vets are just milking the owners and how realistic is that the animal recovers and how neccessary all the tests are, i know someone who paid our around 10k on top of what insurance pais to extend their dogs life by miserable 2 months when he was unable to walk etc. 10k!

I took my (old) dog to the vet today. They tried to sell me a £450 ultrasound and a £250 blood test. I just bought the meds I knew I needed and that cost £120!

I can't comprehend why small animal vet bills are so much more expensive than large animal bills.

I have two dogs and a horse, and the horse vet bills cost less than my dogs (horse has needed extensive dental work, and an operation under general anesthesia for a fractured fetlock). So not minor visits.

everyone loves the super vet… they never say on tv that the average bill will be £10-20K

I work in the industry… it is not particularly well paid for frontline staff but the fact that most practices are corporate owned means that there are a raft of middle managers and share holders who want to be paid.

FIP is a horrible, difficult to diagnose condition and unfortunately is most commonly diagnosed in young pedigree cats. Unfortunately neurological conditions can often only be diagnosed with expensive scans (and when an mri scanner costs >£1 million plus energy/maintenance running costs, you can maybe understand why each scan is so expensive). Thankfully there is a relatively new treatment available in the U.K. for FIP(although not in many other countries, desperate owners will try to buy it on the black market in these situations). It is an antiviral also used in humans for serious viruses so is not cheap medicine.

i have worked in the industry >20 years. Even In the 2000s veterinary medicine was a lot more basic, the local vet pinning legs and cruciate repairs with much more rudimentary techniques, amputating legs, putting animals to sleep without tests/treatment or putting them on steroids without a diagnosis. This is sometimes still done when costs are prohibitive.

it is fraud to charge more because a pet is insured, but insurance does give vets the freedom to work up cases properly or take repeated monitoring bloods for example, rather than doing medicine with guesswork and sequential testing to save money for clients.

I am sorry you have been through such a traumatic time with your cat and I hope she recovers. Sadly this is not a straight forward diagnosis and we are at least lucky in this country to have access to specialists and antivirals for animals. I hope you can get some clarity regarding the communication of ongoing costs though