[fabsroman]

Skyline,

I don't disagree with what you are saying either. There are bad people in all professions. Same thing goes for mechanics, doctors, car salesmen, etc. As long as there is greed, we will have this problem.

The way the managine partner at the firm I worked at justified his $300 an hour fee compared to my $135 an hour fee at that time was that it took me three hours to accomplish what he could do in an hour. Quite honestly, I think that is a pile of crap. If I knew what I was doing, I could do it just as quickly as he could. I just didn't know as much as him. Since I went on my own, my legal rate has been $125 an hour, but I am being forced to raise it to $135 an hour because everything else has gone up. My malpractice insurance, for both legal and accounting, has increased. My legal research on-line program has gone from $220 a month to $250 a month. My tax software has gone from $200 a year to $500 a year. That is just to name a few things that have increased over the past three years, not to mention the price of gas. Oh yeah, I had to buy a new computer this December because the old one decided to die on me. I also decided to upgrade my backup system.

Luckily, I don't have to pay for rent or a lot of administrative staff.

Now, if all my time were billable, and assuming that I worked a standard 40 hour work week with a two week vacation, my gross would be a little less than $250,000 a year, but I can assure you that I am far from that. I spend a good amount of time on billing, collecting, and marketing.

I am sure that the big city vets have to pay a decent amount of money on rent and administrative salaries. I know my vet has two receptionists and a couple of techs to help out. Just down the street from my vet, I have a client that rents a 1,700 sf place for $5,800 a month, so I know my vet's rent cannot be cheap.

With that said, I can readily see the difference between my vet and another vet that I went to 4 years ago for the ex fiance's dogs. We had two dogs and every time we went to the vet she liked, it cost us around $500. With the vet I take Nitro to, I usually pay less than $100 a visit. Of course, I have found things that my vet charges a ton for too. He was charing me $80 for heartworm pills that I could get from Drs. Foster & Smith for $40. When I asked him to write me a prescription for the pills, he matched the lower price. Same thing happened with some antibiotics I just bought last month for Nitro. He wanted something like $60 for the prescription, but luckily my wife was there and she is a pharmacist. She works at Target and was able to get the same stuff for $20, so we asked for a prescription and the vet gave us the script.

The ex fiance and I used to have three goldens and she was extremely attached to them. However, one was 13 years old and it was diagnosed with kidney failure. The diagnosis cost $400+ dollars and we were told that they could do dialysis for several months and keep the dog alive, but it would cost several thousands of dollars. I made the decision to put the dog down, even though I cried while it was happening and it makes me sad to think about it now. The cremation bill was another $200.

The second dog that the ex fiance bought, before I knew her, had hip dysplasia at 4 months of age, so she elected to have metal plates installed on his hips for $3,500. When we broke up the dog was 7 years old and I had trained him to hunt pretty well. He was also in very good health. Granted, he is nowhere as good as Nitro at hunting. The ex fiance just didn't do any research on the dog's parents (i.e., she bought the dog from a puppy mill).

Yes, there are good and bad vets out there, but if so many came back to Wolvie with the same price, something tells me that there is more involved with the surgery than you and I know about. This reminds me of clients that think it takes me 5 minutes to draft a letter. They don't see the amount of time I spend trying to figure everything out or the actual amount of time it takes to draft the letter. I spent 20 hours drafting something for my dad once, which turned out to be 4 pages in length and I had to review 100 pages of documents to draft it. He thought it only took me an hour to do it.

Edited to add:

Gob,

I just saw your post and could not believe it. I would never go to that vet again the rest of my life. Sad thing is that I don't blame the vet, I kind of blame society. Look at what happened with Nike and the Air Jordans when they first came out. I think the shoes cost somewhere close to $200. Now, are any shoes worth that much? Just don't ask a woman that question!!!!!! However, kid's parents were buying them so that there kid could have the latest and greatest and be cool in school. Kids were getting shot on the street for their Air Jordans and Starter jackets. Was Nike responsible for this? Quite honestly, if you had the time and the money, you should have sent out a mass mailing to a bunch of people around the vet letting them know the story.