When Emily’s vet noticed an abnormality with her 16-year-old cat Bella’s liver, her immediate concern — like it would be for all animal owners — was with keeping her pet alive.
“You kind of go into A&E mode of ‘right, she’s gravely ill, what can we do to save her’,” says the writer and mother-of-two, 41, from north London. “First it was her liver, then they found fluid on her lungs, and then she lost her eyesight. One thing kind of led to another to another — her body was just shutting down.”
Over the next month, as Bella’s condition rapidly deteriorated, Emily and her husband took their vet’s advice and tried whatever they could — injections, pills, weeks of overnight care — in a desperate bid to prolong her life. They ended up spending an eye-watering £10,000 in the space of just a month — a significant hit on their attempts at saving for a house.
The couple are far from alone in feeling that they’d been overcharged. Last week, the Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) regulator announced that it is to launch a formal investigation into the veterinary market after identifying “multiple concerns”, including that pet owners may be overpaying for treatments and medicines.
For many of the country’s 17 million pet owners, the news is hardly a surprise. Since the investigation was announced, the CMA has reportedly received an “unprecedented” 56,000 responses from concerned pet owners and vets themselves, with owners up and down the UK taking to social media to complain of “astronomical” fees for minor procedures, such as £400 for fixing a rabbit’s dislocated toe and £7,000 to mend a dog’s broken leg.
Many say their vets fail to advertise treatment costs online or in-person until the final bill is presented, with several left with little choice but to resort to often-risky at-home treatments instead. According to research by Snoots Vets, 84 per cent of pet owners in London have put off visiting their local surgery, for fear of how much it will set them back.
It’s a bit of a gold rush, they can charge whatever they want
For Emily and her husband, forking out for Bella’s care was a period of great anxiety both financially and emotionally. “The vet would call us out, and we’d think ‘we’re going to have to give her the injection and say goodbye’. So we’d go in, she’d perk up, and we’d think ‘Oh God, we can’t do this’. We’ve got a little girl and she was very in love with her. So we thought: let’s spend a bit more money, and try a few more things.”
They ended up digging into money they had spent the last four years diligently putting away for a house deposit. “Friends were like ‘You’re insane, how could you spend that amount of money trying to keep an old cat alive?’ People probably thought that we were mental or that we were really rich. But wefelt like we were doing the right thing at the time.”
The couple believed the treatment would be covered by their insurance — they’d been forking out £17 a month in pet insurance for 16 years — but loopholes in what they could claim for meant the reality was not as straightforward. They ended up paying £3,000 of the £10,000 out of their own pocket, and tragically, the procedures hardly bought Bella any extra time. She ended up passing away just a few weeks after she came out of hospital.
“It’s lawless,” says Emily. “Because of the NHS, our grasp on what pharmaceuticals cost is quite limited. So, when you get to animals, it’s a bit of a gold rush, they can charge whatever they want.”
Sam Dixon, a freelance food stylist from Leyton, agrees. She spent more than £1,000 on simple eye drops for her four-year-old French bulldog Gus. “You just get the bill right at the end, they don’t break it down for you. So I was just guessing what I was paying for,” she says.
“We just couldn’t afford it,” explains Rachel Christie, a writer from Enfield, who had to make the difficult decision to end her sausage dog Dexter’s chemotherapy early due to astronomical bills. “It would be up to £750 for a chemotherapy session, and they recommended that every week. In terms of what you’re actually paying for, you’re not given much of a breakdown, they just tell you ‘this is what we have to do,’ and you’re like, well, whatever it takes to save his life. We have two kids with two childcare bills. It’s money we could have put elsewhere, it came out of our savings.”
So why the spike in vet prices? Is there enough regulation in place? And what can be done for those who can’t afford to pay?
It would be up to £750 for a chemotherapy session, and they recommended that every week
One of the concerns raised by the watchdog is a lack of information, with many consumers saying they lacked the data to make an informed decision over their pet’s care. “I’m fairly medically-minded, and I’m a journalist, I’m able to synthesise information,” says Emily. “But I don’t know about cat medicine — what am I supposed to know about names of drugs? But when you get down to it, it’s like, I can’t believe you’ve charged me £200 for painkillers — there’s no way it costs that much, it just isn’t possible.”
Dixon agrees. When her dog Gus started suffering from eye ulcers two years ago, she too discovered that the cost of the eye drops he was being prescribed seemed suspiciously high. “Each appointment would cost at least £70, and then there were the drops on top of that — sometimes the whole thing would cost like £200.”
She later found that she could buy the same medication at a more reasonable price online, so now swerves the vet entirely.
Insiders say one of the biggest drivers of soaring prices has been a rise in corporate takeovers of independent vet surgeries. In 2013, just 10 per cent of practices were owned by the “big six” corporate groups — CVS, IVC, Linnaeus, Medivet, Pets at Home and VetPartners. Now that figure stands at almost 60 per cent.
Nick Horniman, who has more than 20 years’ experience as a vet working in Gloucestershire, has seen first-hand the effects of the increase in corporate takeovers.
“When practices are sold from independent ownership to corporate, then the fees go up,” he says. “What people need to understand is that it’s the corporate vets that are overcharging for these drugs. The money isn’t going to the individual vets themselves.”
On average, vets in the UK make around £50,000 a year, for a job which requires between five and six years of training. “People assume that the veterinary surgeon they’re seeing is being well paid. You can make a good living, but it’s not colossal amounts — it’s about half what a GP makes.”
There’s a very high suicide rate in the profession, it’s not all playing with puppies and kittens
When speaking to vets about exorbitant treatment costs, this is a recurring sentiment — that there is a misconception that surgeons themslves are profiting, which is damaging public perception of an already stressful industry.
“There’s a very high suicide rate in the profession”, says Horniman. “It’s not all lovely, playing with puppies and kittens — we have an awful lot of stress. These vets are all employees. They’re not being super-paid. So where’s the money going?”
Where indeed? Corporate vet companies themselves say they are engaging with the CMA, and that their business models promote innovation, but owners and regulators are unconvinced. Solutions, of course, are far from straightforward, but one area looking ripe for overhaul is the large revenues from medicines. “We don’t set the prices, and we can’t even buy drugs online for the reduced prices either, because big corporations own these pharmacies too”, one vet tells me. “We need legally enforced transparency on prices, and caps on prescription fees, otherwise we’re the ones that end up looking bad”.
In the meantime, owners like Emily feel left in a tragic position. “We’ve said, if [our other cat] Ruby gets unwell, we’ll just have to just put her down straight away,” she says. “It’s heartbreaking.”
