Costs of medication from vet - a sense check!

[mintbiscuit]

Our BT is being treated for an eye ulcer.

Vet sold us clorogen eye drops (£60) and Loxicom (£30) painkiller

Clorogen is an OTC medicine for humans at £10.

Loxicom is £5.98 online without px.

I feel like we’ve been well and truly shafted! Is this right???

The eye drops even have instructions for humans!!! Why am I paying such a huge mark up???

In the future can I just request a prescription and source elsewhere?

Yesterday my vet would have charged me £67 for 100ml Loxicom.

I paid the £20 prescription fee and £20 to order online . It’s bonkers!

And that prescription lasts for six months if you need a repeat, you don’t need to buy another prescription.

It's bonkers. When our vet was an independent I was happy to pay a bit more to get it direct from them. Now they've been taken over by a big corporate so there are no feelings of loyalty there any longer.

Just watching BBC news and apparently a formal review is being done on vet costs. Overpaying for prescriptions is one of the factors!

sorry don’t know how to link!

Let's hope something useful comes out of it. Regulating the price that vets have to pay for meds would be a good start.

No, the review is to ensure no single corporate is monopolising the market in any one area and pushing up prices. The government cannot dictate what a private company charges for their services, be it a veterinary surgery or a wholesaler or a hairdresser!
As pp said the mark up wasn't £50 as vets have to pay more for their drugs than online pharmacies.

And vets have a tonne of overhead that online places don’t.

Prescriptions is actually one of the main ways independent vets stay in business and cover overheads.

It’s great people want to be frugal and get prescriptions online but all it actually does is damage independent vet practices that then get gobbled up by big corporations as they can’t make ends meet.

Up to a point, I’d have been happy to pay a bit more than the online price too, but not an over 300% markup!

Bear in mind I had also paid the £55 appointment fee-twice- which I don’t quibble

I also made it clear to my vet that I was happy to pay the fee for the prescription (£35) as I appreciate I’m paying for her expertise and training.

I've never known anywhere charge a 300% mark up. It's usually 100%, sometimes as low as 30%. Plus the fee includes someone ordering in the drugs, someone delivering the drugs, someone prescribing, someone dispensing, someone else to check the dispensing etc

100ml loxicom from my vet £67
online £20
prescription fee £35, BUT I can use the prescription several times

Id have happily paid up to about £35 as I’d not have had the prescription fee on that, it’s a mad business model

My vet once gave me a prescription for my dog for piriton (although I'm certain it didn't say that brand name on it)
They didn't have it in stock and told me to go to the local chemist who asked me whether I wanted it via the prescription (around £30) or OTC for £3.99... crazy!

This is the invoice for the first prescription, for 10ml(ten), which was to make sure he was ok on it.online it’s about £6 for this quantity. Tell me it’s not a poor business model…

Naive question, why do vet charge a prescription fee separate from the consultation fee? When you see a doctor writing a prescription is included in the consultation fee, isn’t it?
Sorry, slightly off topic!

Because it’s a service they provide and it’s a business so you pay for it. Same as paying your GP for a private prescription or a letter.

I wouldn’t have been charged the prescription fee if I’d bought the meds from the vet, but I’d already done the pricing research before going to the appointment.

You're right it's a mad business model. Traditionally vets relied on huge marks up on meds whilst massively undercharging for services and paying support staff very poorly. Now with online pharmacies and huge shortages in the profession pushing up wages vets are having to charge appropriately for services, which people then moan about whilst sourcing cheap meds 🤷. Profit has to be made somewhere otherwise there'd be no vets.

The same reason why you pay for prescriptions from the GP.

The problem is, nobody is going to happily pay £20 for paracetamol when they can get it for 20p in Tesco.

Luckily our vets are still independently run and are upfront about what we can get cheaper elsewhere.

It’s got far worse since
a) independent vets being taken over by huge conglomerates
and ,

b) the widespread uptake of pet insurance.

I remember when insurance was first becoming a thing ( I’m very old, had multiple dogs for more than seventy years) & my old vet died suddenly so had to find another. I tried several to begin with & the very first question I was being asked was, “Do you have pet insurance?” . Not why I wanted an appointment, what was ailing my dog
Perhaps I’m just an old cinic but years of experience, mine & fellow owner/ breeder,exhibitors, I’m afraid makes you this way.
I eventually found a vet who was wonderful. Stuck with her for years, always very fair & we became friends. She retired two years ago & the practice was bought out by Medivet. Prices have rocketed & even worse you never see the same vet twice who sometimes try to push unwarranted treatment, ie my 17 year old was limping, wanted to X-ray for unclosed growth plates!!!!
She had been a show dog, a champion, I pointed said vet to some pus on her paw where she’d got an infection, nuff said 😳🤨

I’ve just calculated my DDog’s meds (Thyforon 200micrograms) and it works out at £57.50 - off the top of my head - and if I were to order via Viovet or Animeds, the cost per 250 count pack plus the prescription would be just under £5 more.

The advantage of our vets (a national chain) is they have greater leverage to buy at near wholesale prices.

When his next bloods are done (in May), and providing his thyroid levels are still stable, we should be able to buy the 400 microgram 250 pack and thus save even more money on a per dose basis. He’s currently on 4x200micrograms split between 2 doses, so a 250 count pack of 400microgram tabs will last twice as long. As he’s still within a year of diagnosis he’s on the smallest tab dose size (and then multiplied is needed) so we can easily modify the dose accordingly as we head towards his stable dose.

I’m very lucky that I have an old school bestie who is a vet (unfortunately not local now) so could check against her supplier’s pricing and say, “Yep, you’ve got a bloody good deal!”.

We do use Viovet for our dog & cat flea prevention treatment, as well as worming tabs as they work out cheaper than our vet’s price.