Do you think this could work?

[Darklane]

Many of us have complained on here & in real life at the increasingly extortionate fees vets charge for treatment these days, especially operations & drugs. Also the high premiums of pet insurance especially as pets get older. There is a lot of money to be made from caring pet owners & the money men are very involved these days, insurance companies & more & more vet practices being bought out by the big conglomerates. All going to line the pockets of the already wealthy. I know we can get drugs online with a vet prescription & save into a special account instead of paying for insurance, both of which I do, but it’s a drop in the ocean really when you look at the overall costs.

So I’ve been thinking & wondering if something like this might work, what do you think?
Just suppose if all the pet charities were to get together & set up something like an insurance scheme, more affordable than many inflated prices many pay now, & had their own vet practices employing vets on a salary, something that everybody who wanted to could use not just people on benefits who, I think, can use Blue Cross. Then if you needed a vet you went along to their designated surgeries & paid something reasonable, subsidised by the “ insurance” for involved, complicated treatments & if you were able you could add a donation. Any profits would go to supporting the charities that were involved, they could class them as donations which would mean they could get gift aid which would increase them by 25%, so I’ve been told by someone who helps run a charity ( not pet).
Something like that could blow a hole through these huge vet conglomerates if it really caught on, help keep vet fees more affordable like they used to be & we’d know that what we were contributing to would be animal welfare charities rather than financial money men.
I’m no financier nor worked for a charity so don’t know how this could be set up, perhaps others might, & it’s just a seed of an idea that would need organisational knowledge beyond mine but just wondered what you thought of it as the germ of an idea?

Possibly.

I suspect the stumbling block is the cause of some of the high commercial costs - namely the massive investment required for modern, high tech equiptment required for all sorts of diagnostics and treatments these days.

How does a company initially fund and then maintain £1m+ worth of equipment? If it can't it'll have to refer to contract out and you''re back to sqaure one with the costs.

Big business has almost certainly led to high costs but so has an expectation that many ailments can be diagnosed and treated - vs 'he's looking rough these days and it's not obivous why, let's see if he gets better with antibiotics, if not PTS' which tended to be the approach of old.

I think the vet's salary is the cheapest bit of setting up a vet practice (sadly).

In theory it's a great idea.

But animal charities are rarely for the animals or the animals owners. They only care about profits. The RSPCA CEO earns £162K. My local RSPCA shelter feeds the dogs 'Butchers' - on average a tin is 8% protein. Might as well feed them dirt. I doubt it would take long for them to fill their pockets and badge it as 'helping'

My vets practice have a breakdown on their noticeboard which details the the proportion of money from castration/spaying goes where - as it's the operation most pet owners are familiar with.

It's something like £30% would go towards rent/building maintenance, 30% on purchasing new equipment and maintaining current equipment, 10% to the vets and staff salaries and the rest on buying in medication, maintaining equipment (table, IT etc), their own insurance etc. They're a reasonably large practice (10 vets, 12 RVS and 3 SVNs) and they're part of a big chain. They charge £250 for neutering. So, of that, £25 goes towards staff salaries.

They're currently advertising for a new veterinary partner (so someone very senior, they want 15 years experience minimum). £50K a year. Which sounds like a lot, but quite frankly is nothing when you think of the skills and experience they would need.

Yes, vets are expensive. But there are lots of hidden costs that the average person does not see and even these 'big' companies face them. Ultimately, the cost of everything has increased ridiculously - vets bills are just in line with that.