Despite spending over $2.25 billion every year on vet bills, most Canadians don’t have pet insurance, and that’s a situation that needs to change, or so says Dr. Michael Ethier, director of emergency and critical care medicine at the Toronto Veterinary Emergency Hospital.
"Looking into insurance and getting educated on insurance I think is a huge benefit for most families [with pets]," says the Toronto veterinarian.
"Unless you're in a position to be fiscally responsible and put money aside either before you get your first pet or accumulated over the years of the pet and hope that its illness happens later on where you've developed that nest egg."
In the documentary "Pets, Vets & Debts," which made its world premiere on CBC-TV's "The Nature of Things" last night, Ethier also said that keeping a pet is analogous to purchasing a home or raising a family – a long-term commitment that is guaranteed to rack up expense over its lifespan.
He also sees Canada’s single-payer healthcare system as contributing to ignorance among consumers as to the cost of medical care.
"There's not a person in veterinary medicine, especially within specialty referral medicine, that will ever say to someone it's not expensive to treat severely ill or complex pets," says Ethier, who appears in the doc.
According to the doc, Canadians collectively spend more than $2.25 billion annually on vet bills. For Americans, that number is $14 billion.
