Originally Posted by froggy7
That's an easy one.. you aren't paying for just the ibuprofen. You are paying for the hospital administration costs, the salaries of the staff (down to the janitor), the record keeping, the people who don't pay their bills that the hospital has to eat, etc. It's the same reason that the steak dinner you get at the restaurant is $25 when you could make it at home for $8.
And the costs that you pay at the vet are actually closer to what medical costs should be. And even then, most vets don't charge what they really should in order to make reasonable money at their job. As the vet put it... we don't like to feel that we are turning people away because they can't pay, but we need to make enough to stay open.
And I have gotten to see a very interesting panel meeting where a bunch of doctors carefully skirted around the question of what's a reasonable price to pay to keep someone alive for a year. If you can put something on the market that can do that, but it's going to cost roughly $300,000 for that year, should you put it on the market, or is that too much cost for too little gain? Never have I seen doctors duck a question as much as they did that one.