006. Vet bills
Description
This article is from the Basic Health Care FAQ, posted to rec.pets.cats newsgroup. Maintained by Cindy Tittle Moore with numerous contributions by others.
006. Vet bills
You should be prepared to handle routine costs from year to year incurred by yearly physical exams, occassional fecal samples (and worming medication), plus yearly vaccinations. However, accidents and major illnesses can happen. Sometimes, pet health care insurance is one way people use to control these costs. Other times you might try vet schools which may give you reduced rates for their students to have the opportunity to work with your cat, especially if the problem is rare or uncommon.
You might be able to negotiate a monthy payment toward a large bill, or a slightly reduced one in exchange for a bit of labor or other work (for example, one accountant prepared his vet's taxes in exchange for reducing the cost of surgery that his dog had had).
The humane society may know of lower-cost clinics or vets who are prepared to cut prices for people who are not particularly well off. It can't hurt to call around and ask.
But as other posters have mentioned, being a vet is a business, too, and vets tend not to have high incomes. They also have many of the same expenses as an MD (equipment, office staff) and the additional expenses of running their own pharmacy (and animal medicine is just as expensive as people medicine).
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