Vet bills are too damn high, and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren agrees with me. She’s investigating one of the private equity firms that is gobbling up all the veterinary practices, raising rates, and lowering quality care as a result.
As someone with a dog and a cat, I am well aware of what happens when your preferred veterinary practice is bought out by a PE firm because it happened to me in the past two years. You start paying significantly more money, and it feels like services get tacked on you’re not entirely sure you need. I just took my cat in for an ear infection, and somehow, the visit ended up costing nearly $800. That’s more expensive than human health care costs! What is happening here?!
Private Equity is happening. They are snatching up veterinary clinics and hospitals across the country, as well as pet insurance companies. One PE firm, in particular, is being accused of unsavory business practices: JAB Holding Company, also known as the firm that ruined the quality of Panera because they bought them out in 2017, and it’s just a fact everything that PE firms touch turn to s**t. That’s essentially a PE firm’s business model: take something good, extract as much money out of it as possible, which you do by raising prices and lowering costs, and then sell it off to the highest bidder once you’ve sucked everything you can out of it. It’s basically the worst kind of vampire. (Edward Cullen of Twilight being the best, obviously.)
Enter Senator Warren, who along with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn), sent a letter to those turds (JAB) wanting to know the extent of their involvement in the veterinarian industry. Good!
Rolling Stone has an excerpt from the letter:
“Given that more than two-thirds of U.S. households own a pet, corporate consolidation of veterinary care and an accompanying rise in prices represents a major issue for American consumers and a life and death issue for their pets. […] Private equity rollups of veterinary practices harm veterinarians and customers alike.”
It’s probably obvious how PE can harm customers—again, $800 just to treat my cat’s ear infection. Veternarian costs have risen sixty percent in the past ten years! However, you may wonder how it harms veterinarians. Well, that’s mainly because many PE-bought clinics tie veterinarian compensation to their sales. I say this with no hyperbole: private equity ruins everything good.
If that’s not bad enough, JAB has its own pet insurance companies (they own Embrace and Figo, among others) which the senators also want more details on. From Rolling Stone:
“In addition to rolling up competing veterinary practices, JAB also owns numerous pet insurance brands,” the senators write. “This vertical integration may empower JAB to preference its own insurance brands at its clinics.”
In the year 2024 in our capitalistic hellscape, nothing terrible should really surprise me anymore. However, there is something so grossly cynical about some finance jagoff looking over at the veterinarian industry and deciding that it was ripe for the picking, boning us all in the process. These vultures are taking advantage of the love we have for our pets, and it’s incredibly gross. I, for one, am glad someone with some power is doing something about it.
Published: Aug 9, 2024 05:19 pm