Bella’s spay day....nervous!

[poiuytrewq]

I insured because I don’t have quick access to credit and I was a student, and in my final year, Margot had a bill of around £2500, and that was with my discount for working at the vets! Granted she had CT and a specialist operation and referral to a specialist, but I wanted to be able to provide that if I needed to so I was very glad of insurance at that point! Even now as a vet I couldn’t afford the cost of a CT without insurance, and they are the best imaging modality in small furries for many common conditions. It’s amazing how much of a bill they can rack up overnight and when I was a student, I would have been majorly scuppered!

It honestly never occurred to me that vets had to pay vet bills!

 

[Redders]

Haha it never did to me either before I started this journey! But yes, we do. The only way you could get it for free is if you own the practice, which is hard to achieve these days. I can do my own ‘consults’ and checks but have to pay for anything else, plus vets find it hard to treat their own so usually have to pay as one of the other vets will consult for you and policy may be that all consults are charged then discounted. Almost all of my vet based friends will have insured pets because of this, and because if their pets ever need referral to specialists, that is full price (unless you already are a specialist). One perk is I can write my own prescriptions for free! But still have to pay for the meds ?
if one of my pets needed say a surgery, I could keep the costs down slightly by saying I will do it in my own time and not work time, but I will still need a nurse and animal care assistant, I’ll still be using equipment and medication and I would be blocking a theatre that can’t be used for a clients pets surgery, and all those things cost money so me trying to do a surgery on the cheap at 0100 on a Sunday night wouldn’t actually make it that much cheaper!
It’s one of the reasons why the comment of ‘if you loved animals you would do it for free’ is a bugbear, because we can’t actually do it for free!