Several years back, Elizabeth worked as an office manager at a vet clinic. She enjoyed the work, although it didn’t pay well. One of the most frequent complaints from the customers was the high cost of vet care. This graph from The Enterprise Blog shows that the rates of increase in healthcare costs are intriguingly similar between pets and their owners (note the different scales on the left and right side of the chart):

The chart [. . .] shows spending on veterinary care, which I pulled from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and national health expenditures (for people) from the National Income and Product Accounts. Two things are interesting here: first, the rate of growth of spending from 1984 to 2006 wasn’t all that different — and in both cases, spending grew faster than the rate of economic growth. As new technologies are developed for humans, we adopt them for Bowser and Fifi — because we can afford to and we think it’s worth it.

Here in Canada, where we almost never know the actual costs of the healthcare services we receive, the stark reality that healthcare costs money is a nasty surprise. We don’t spend anything like the same real dollars on our dogs, cats, and other pets as on ourselves or our family, and the fact that we don’t have a clue how expensive it is fuels the constant political demand that we provide more “free” healthcare.

On the other hand, in much of Canada, it’s possible to get X-rays, MRI, CT scans, and other diagnostic tests done in hours or days . . . for your pet. For you, weeks or months before you’ll get your appointment. If only there were some obvious conclusion we could draw from these data points . . .

I wrote about the pet health/human health disconnect all the way back in 2004.