13 yr old Dachshund found outside vet’s w/desperate plea. He is sick. Please put him to sleep

[Divernan]

31. There's a surplus of vets, so many are performing unnecessary tests/procedures.

Locally some people had a dog who was hit by a car and had a broken leg - happened on a Sunday when their local vet's office was closed, so they took him to the new super fancy emergency animal hospital, where all the vets are "board certified" in some specialty or other - even the ones who got their vet's degrees at St. Kitt's in the Caribbean. They were given an estimate of over $3,000 for x-rays, pins and plates. When they said they couldn't afford that, were told, well we can amputate his leg for only $1500. Were also offered chance to sign a loan agreement to pay over time. They took their dog home, took him into their local vet on Monday, who splinted and wrapped the leg. The leg healed. I looked into getting my senior cat's teeth cleaned, purely as a preventive measure - and they wanted to do numerous x-rays, stress test, echocardiogram. When I said I couldn't afford an additional $400 for the echocardiogram, suddenly they were willing to go ahead without that test. Then my bill would only have been $1200. This hospital's front desk were very high pressure sales types. I got a really bad feeling and decided against taking my pet there. Researched it on the internet and found, not only a lot of bitter complaints about this emergency hospital, but this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/business/high-debt-and-falling-demand-trap-new-veterinarians.html?_r=0

She also has $312,000 in student loans, courtesy of Ross University School of Veterinary Medicine, on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Or rather, $312,000 was what she owed the last time she could bring herself to log into the Sallie Mae account that tracks the ever-growing balance.

“It makes me sick, watching it increase,” she says. “There’s also the stress of how am I going to save for retirement when I have this bear to pay off.”

"Starting salaries have sunk by about 13 percent during the same 10-year period, in inflation-adjusted terms, to $45,575 a year, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association. America may be pet-crazed and filled with people eager to buy expensive fetch toys and heated cat beds. But the total population of pets is going down, along with the sums that owners are willing to spend on the health care of their animals, one of the lesser-known casualties of the recession.

Today, the ratio of debt to income for the average new vet is roughly double that of M.D.’s, according to Malcolm Getz, an economist at Vanderbilt University. To practitioners in the field, such numbers are ominous, and they portend lean times for new graduates.