I would stop using ANY vet that charged me more than a nominal fee for prescription writing. $50 is absurd and ridiculous. Not to mention greedy has heck to boot!:mad:
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I did a little research
Education Law section 6807 limits the quantity of a drug that may be supplied for a fee by prescribers to no more than a 72-hour supply. UNLESS THE MEDICINE IS GIVEN FOR FREE!
You may view this law in its entirety at our website: http://www.op.nysed.gov click on Title VIII then click on Article 137. We hope this is helpful. If questions remain, please contact us at the number listed below.
All professionals licensed by this Department must release records to a client or patient upon request. This would include prescriptions. While most veterinarians typically dispense the necessary medications, a client may certainly request a prescription for the purpose of having it filled elsewhere.
Please let me know if you have additional questions.
Peter Ferguson
NY State Boards for Optometry and Veterinary Medicine
This is one of my biggest pet peeves. I am an MD and I think this is HIGHLY unethical practice by vets and absolutely inexcusable. AN MD would loose thier licence for this type of behavior! It is going to take horse owners complaining and voting with thier wallets to change this practice. I hope your vet comes around for you!
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My vet either matches the price I find or charges $25 for a script. He said he couldn’t match Mountain Vets prices and wrote the script. I still come out ahead of my current situation where my BO charges $70 to supply the meds and give the shot. If I supply the Adequan, she will charge me $15 to give the shot.
My vets will supply a script.
But what they charge for medicine is pretty much what I would pay from a mail order. So I don’t bother with the script.
One vet I used in the past would get his knickers in a wad if you wanted to have a supply of meds. He is no longer my vet.
I don’t mind paying a small fee for a prescritpion, but have thus far been able to make deals with my vet. We often split the difference between his charge for a drug and on online price. I value his services and feel that this is fair. Ideally, medical providers are seeing patients for whom they prescribe and are getting an office visit fee. I rarely will call in a new prescription for someone whom I’ve not seen recently.
Our vet just goes “oh, well I’ll sell it to you for that price”
I requested a prescription for Adequan from my vet practice, for my horses, and he agreed, then asked me what I pay. I said I get it for $37/vial from Mtn Vet.
He came back and offered it to me for $40/vial, so I bought it from him.
Of course, I bought 4 boxes…and thinking I was going to be buying the 4 count boxes and I got the 7 count boxes. I’m well stocked for the year for both of my ponies who get it!:lol:
I just got a second bottle of SMZ-TMP from my vet who charged 48% over what I could buy it from Smartpak. Considering I drove 30 minutes and picked it up, all the vet was paying was a stocking and shipping from wherever he ordered it from, assuming he was paying the same as the Smartpak price. I would have much preferred a $10 scrip fee. 48% is way too much as far as I’m concerned.
The vet has argued that they need to make the overhead on meds because they charge so much less than human doctors for calls and visits.
Maybe this is her policy, and she’s entitled to her own policies. I’d ask her to reconsider and if she says “no” (and her explanation why does not suit you) tell her you’ll be asking another vet for the prescription. If her reason why she won’t give you an Rx makes sense, perhaps you can reconcile things.
Pulling charts, making changes, calling in prescriptions, re-writing botched up Rxs from other providers–these are all things we have to do every single day, and never have I charged for that service. It’s part of the job.
My vet also matches any price I can come up with for Adequan and only charges “cost” for shipping. In return, I’m happy to pay his moderate mark-up on other medications that he supplies for me.
Or vet looked at our badly coughing horse for the second time, scoping him then, still didn’t find anything but laryngitis and GAVE us a whole 500 pill new bottle to give him 20 pills twice a day.
Nor all vets try to charge for every little thing.
Ask your vet if she will sell you the Adequan from her supplier [B]at cost.
“[/B] My small animal vet had the same policy - no prescriptions. They stated concerns about how the medications had been handled and not knowing if any detrimental effects had come of it. We’re talking heartguard and frontline here, nothing complicated”
God, that is such BS.
Since I really like my vet I plan to call her and just ask her for the script and then take it from there if she says no. She knows I am a medical provider and I suspect she knows that I know this is BS. I would be happy to buy it from her for the same price…but I already spent $600 for the lameness workup and 2 sets of injections that she admitted probably wouldn’t work but were needed to rule out certain issues. I am fine with all that…she is upfront about what she knows and what is a mystery…
But I am NOT okay with giving her $91 for some kind of baloney reason about quality…so I am hoping this is just the office staff standard line and my vet will come through.:yes:
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My experience on this was with a cat who needed thyroid medication. My local vet’s charge for the medication was going to be around $700/month. No, they wouldn’t write a prescription for me to obtain it elsewhere. I knew a lot of people who were medicating for this thyroid condition, and not a one could have afforded that, more less for the multiple thyroid cats they were treating. I had a cat years ago that I used the radiation treatment on successfully (at the price of meds, it made sense), but the cat was younger and in better overall health.
I started nosing around asking friends, found a Yahoo group dealing with feline thyroid issues, and educated myself on who was paying how much, what area of the country, amount of vets practicing in an area (which seems to make a difference sometimes), etc.
And I took my cat to another vet in a different city. Who without prompting, told dh that most of his patients got the meds at Costco, and that he would gladly facilitate us getting it at Costco. Price at Costco for a month, back then as I recall (it has been quite awhile), was around $30. For the whole month. Vs. $700.
FWIW.
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My vets lowered their prices on heartworm and frontline, but it is STILL cheaper to order them from Australia (PetsMegaStore.com). I am baffled by the whole thing, that it is significantly less expensive to buy the EXACT SAME medication (NOT generic) and have it shipped all the way from Australia, and still have it cost less than it does in this country. ???
This thread is interesting to me.
While I’ve owned 18-20 horses for the last 20 years I know I could save a ton of money by getting a prescription from my vet and ordering online.
But I don’t. The reason is two fold.
First, I DO worry about the conditions underwhich drugs from middlemen/catalogs are housed. So many require temperature control. How do I know they aren’t sitting in a 90 degree warehouse. Or they are delivered and the UPS guy sets them in the sun? I particularly worry about this with vaccines.
Second, large animal vets do not make nearly the same amount of money and (profit – that means what they can take home and live on and support a family) as small animal vets. When I have a small animal issue I schlep the dog or cat in…I wait. I have a huge bill. When there’s an emergency I get a recording telling me to take my emergency to the nearest (30 mile away) emergency clinic.
On the other hand, my equine vet schelps from farm to farm and comes to my horses’ aid no matter the circumstance…often in the wee hours of the morning if an emergency requires it. They work with huge animals who can become dangerous and fractious when they are ill or injured…often in less than optimum conditions (not with a vet tech to aid them…but owners, who sometimes cannot handle their horse effectively due to lack of skill or inability to control their emotions in a crisis). These folks risk a lot more both physically and time-wise than small animal vets, running from farm to farm and emergency to emergency day and night.
So if my equine vet marks up the drugs needed handily for my horses’ care, I’m more than happy to pay it. He deserves to make a profit somewhere – it is a hard profession. And he deserves to have a decent income just like any working person…especially because he’s “on call” 24/7 and it’s a thankless job many times.
Thank God, these people love what they do. It’s no wonder there is going to be a shortage of large animal vets down the road…when a small animal practice is logistically, financially and physically easier.
That’s the way I feel about this issue, though I’m sure some folks think I’m throwing money down the drain. I feel just the opposite.
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IMO, the comparison to human doctors is not valid, because they don’t supply meds (unless you count free samples). When you run a small “pharmacy” at a vet practice, the costs are not just shipping, storing, and keeping track of everything – if you order too much of something (to make it more convenient for your clients), you may end up eating the cost of drugs that expire before you sell them.
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[QUOTE=Hannahsmom;2252836]
The vet has argued that they need to make the overhead on meds because they charge so much less than human doctors for calls and visits.[/QUOTE]
Just some things to ponder…
I often wonder how some of the vets survive. If they have a lot of one horse owners, that is a pretty labor intensive case load. They spend so much time in their trucks… My vet has a thriving practice, with two other vets working for her. Her prices are pretty high for this area but I don’t mind paying for well seasoned vets. She can get my mares in foal, she has 30 years of experience and knows her stuff. But I notice that she doesn’t exactly live an extravegant lifestyle unless she is stuffing it all in her mattress. 
Also, I recently moved just out of range for my old vet. I had a woman bring her horse to my property. She was clueless about horses. Her mare crashed through the barn door and ate 40# of grain, followed by almost 24 hour colic then laminitis in all 4 feet. I could not get a vet. The woman who owned the horse did not have a regular vet and the vets I called were not taking new clients - especially in an emergency. The vet I finally found was new, out of school, and working in a small animal practice but decided that she would “do horses a few days a week”. She was afraid of the horse, couldn’t get a needle into her or tube her with oil. I had her leave me the banamine and did it myself after she left. I never saw her again and was on my own. It is very scary and extremely frustrating to have a serious problem with a horse and not have access to a good vet!
So, we have to pay them one way or another. It may seem unfair to pay a fee for them to write a prescription but we can pay it there or we can pay it in another charge somewhere else. For the first time in my life, I am going to have one horse, maybe two and am resigned to the fact that I’m probably going to have the vet out to do shots instead of doing them myself just to establish a relationship. I think they probably financially depend on vaccinations and routine tests like coggins and I have no problem paying them enough to make a good living wage.
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assuming he was paying the same as the Smartpak price
Highly unlikely that your vet and SMart Pak are being charged the same price for the SMZ
most drug vendors have a tiered pricing system based on volume
just like most vendors of anything.
the more you buy, the better the price deal you get
I can understand a reasonable markup on meds direct from the vet, they do have to maintain a pharmacy, stock, shipping etc.
What I don’t understand is why they mark up meds to cover other losses?!? Business sense tells me that it would be more advantageous to increase the costs of the actual services to cover that actual service. As a customer, I would rather spend an extra $25 on each farm call (or exam or whatever the actual service was) than to get into the argument of paying extra for drugs since “that’s where we make our profits”. I’d have to imagine that the majority of visits (at least mine have been) are typically the non-drug kind (lameness exam, routine coggins, annual check, injury…) Yeah, some might have sedatives, but the vast majority of us average horse owners out there are not going to be stocking up on ace and dermosadan in case Pokey gets a cut. Why not just charge what you need to cover your actual services?
