For Mary Cotter, the first sign of concern came when her 7-year-old, Logan, appeared dizzy. His regular doctor said everything was fine, but Cotter insisted Logan be seen by a neurologist, who after an MRI found a tumor in his inner ear. An operation followed, and for the next month Cotter took Logan on a four-hour round-trip trek every day from her home in Ledyard, Conn., to a specialty hospital in Boston for radiation therapy.
The total bill for the tests, blood work, surgery and radiation came to $14,000 — not surprising in this age of sky-high medical costs. Except for one thing. Logan is a golden retriever. After another surgery for an unrelated illness, the total cost of Logan's care is approaching $20,000. Today Logan is healthy, but he has a new nickname: "20K."
It's no secret that Americans love their pets. But these days, all that love is leading to an unprecedented level of expense for millions of owners, who are only beginning to understand the pet-world concept of sticker shock. Caught up in a wave of new medical options and lured by an increasingly sophisticated cadre of veterinarians, pet owners across the country are forking over thousands — and even tens of thousands — of dollars to treat illnesses that would have gone undiagnosed or untreated just a few years ago. And then doing it again if they have to.
Of course, pet owners and most vets have the animals' best interest in mind. But that doesn't make it any easier: With health insurance covering the humans in many families, it's not unusual for pet owners to spend far more money on health care for their cats and dogs than for their sons and daughters. Even the Great Recession failed to take a bite out of Fido's health care tab. According to a report by market-research company Packaged Facts, Americans spent $20 billion on veterinary bills in 2010 — an 8.5% increase from a year earlier and more than double the amount spent just a decade ago.Oh hey, look at that, it's a cat getting a CAT scan...
At any rate, in the interest of full disclosure, my wife and I are guilty of having added to the increase in expenditures. When our SPCA rescue kitten, Jobu, was diagnosed with a vaccine-related fibrosarcoma (a cancerous tumor on his rear left hip) last year, we were basically presented with three choices: let the cancer run its course, which would likely mean that our one-year old kitten would die within the year; amputate the affected leg, a procedure which had no guarantee of success; or surgically remove the tumor and initiate a chemotherapy treatment to treat the cancer.
We elected to try the chemotherapy, and did so in large part because we thought it might extend his life from one year to a more full twelve or thirteen (no definitive answer on that yet--he's still kicking but showing signs of kidney problems). While the cost was not negligible, it was just a small fraction of the $20,000 figure cited in the article (which is why even I am able to look at that figure and shake my head in disbelief), and we still wrestled with the somewhat ridiculous concept of feline chemotherapy.
Being the trader that I am, I of course viewed it through the economical eyes of an investor--how many years could this procedure buy us, and how much are we then spending per extra expected year of Jobu's life? By its logical extension, this approach means that if Jobu had already been 9 or 10 years old, I absolutely would have said "no way" to the chemotherapy. Hooray for mental amortization.
But many other people make vastly different decisions, choosing to spend much more money than we did on animals with many fewer years left to live. It's not too different from the situation in human health care, where an estimated 27.4% of total Medicare expenses are used to treat patients in their last year of life, much of it in the last two months. A callous and heartless trader like me would just as soon save the money and spend it on preventive care for younger people...but that's just me.
The question that this article ultimately raises for me is, what is really the best allocation of limited resources? Granted, anyone who is willing to spend $20k on an animal probably doesn't have "limited resources", but the use of $20k on one animal is probably a poor use of them no matter how you slice it.
At a time when animal shelters across the country are facing budget crises (due to decreases in both public and private funding), forcing many of them to reconsider their status as "no-kill" shelters, the question becomes that much more acute for animal lovers. How many animal lives could have been saved with that same $20k that was spent to extend the life of just one sick puppy? And would saving those lives have been a better investment than extending the one life?
They're difficult questions to answer, and they become that much more difficult when emotions become involved. People will always be willing to spend more to extend the life of someone they know personally or intimately than that of an unnamed stranger--it's a strange type of cognitive dissonance that was at the heart of the recent movie The Box (which apparently sucked, but so be it).
These are, however, questions that will need to be answered as we try to fix our national health care problems (for people, not just cats and dogs). At a certain point, we can't spend unlimited dollars--taxpayer dollars, insurance dollars, or otherwise--to extend the life of someone who is certain to die. Different people are bound to draw their cutoff line at different points, and so determining the proper cutoff is a difficult policy issue. Most of us can agree that spending $20k on a dog is absurd, but obviously at least one person disagrees. The question is, what is the right amount, and whose opinion matters most?
[Smart Money]
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