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The difficulty is that while a buncha people may want inexpensive basic care from a 'simple' vet practice, a buncha OTHER people get pretty miffed when they find out the vet cannot do an ultrasound, must send them to another clinic but all but the simplest surgery, bloodwork takes 2 days b/c it must be sent out to a lab, the waiting room is 10 ft square and the cats and dogs are in each others' laps, that sort of thing. When an animal has a problem needing those sorts of mid-level technology and a vet can't provide them, clients tend to wander off to other vet practices. Plus of course the VET tends to want reasonable technology available, because no matter what you may think, most vets WANT to figure out what's wrong with an animal and fix it, and get frustrated at being limited by inadequate equipment or facilities.
Most vets AFAIK structure their pricing so that routine health care is partially subsidizing catastrophic healthcare. Which I think is reasonable, and in animals' best interests. Also, the amount of overhead to run what most people would consider a decently-equipped vet clinic is quite considerable. Not just purchase price but employees, utilities, property tax on the clinic (or rental of the space), etc. So remember that your charges are not JUST paying for, like 15 minutes of the vet's time plus twelve inches of suture material and a squirt of betadine; your money has to cover a lot more that is not directly visible at the time.
Believe me, I know how frustrating it is to not be able to afford treatment or diagnostics for your animals that you feel you owe them. Nonetheless, although it varies, the vets I know do not really make all that much money, they are not millionaires, they are living middle to upper middle class lifestyles. (And heaven knows they are not paying their employees rich salaries either
)
I am not sure why one should begrudge a vet the ability to be middle-class or upper-middle-class any more than one should begrudge providers of other equally-necessary services, such as dentists, electricians, mechanics, etc. (All of which I realize people sometimes complain about *their* pricing too, but seldom with the degree of venom that seems to be directed against vets, hereabouts)
It's just a difficult situation and boils down to the same thing in any other part of life - there is never as much money to go around as there are things we'd like it to go around *to*.
Pat
