The Dreamwidth Journal of zdashamber

Ask yourself, do I have $6000 sitting around that I can spend tonight on my cat? I'm guessing the answer is "I need pet health insurance, which is only about $20 a month, but which I have to buy before my cat is too old, because more than 10 or 11 years old means there's no one who will insure my cat."

$6000 is the price after your cat catches his leg on something while jumping off it and breaks the leg: it covers taking your cat to the emergency vet in the middle of the night to get him painkillers and antibiotics, and then getting the leg pinned together again later. At least 6K. It's probably more than that, because Flat Hair Girl, who had this experience, did not have that kind of money.

I'll tell the story sometime, and it's sad and you might not want to read it, though the cat lives. But the main point of this post is, veterinary bills have gotten insane, and you might not have known. Maybe things are better if you don't go to Berkeley, home of enormously rich people. But I'm thinking that the cost drivers are systemic. This is my hypothesis: 1. Drugs: crazy expensive due in part to the drug war. Ketamine, frex, is both abusable and a veterinary anaesthetic. 2. Veterinary "guild" attitude: frex, there's only one state school in all of California (pop. 60M) that gives out veterinary degrees, and it's damn hard to get into the veterinary program at Davis; and veterinarians from other countries have insane hoops to jump through to be able to practice in America. 3. Pet Health Insurance. Yeah, this ain't a scene, it's a goddamned arms race: once people started thinking "why can't my cat have chemo?" they needed insurance, and then when a decently large number of people got insurance the vets could start charging $4000 for an amputation, which according to Flat Hair Girl was only $300 20 years ago in Illinois.