I was out of town for the wedding of one of my wife’s college friends, and missed the post when it first went up, but Eric (of the oft-linked Classical Values) had an interesting post over the weekend contrasting veterinary care and (human) health care:

The instruments, the drugs, the surgical techniques, sterile hygiene, intravenous lines, and post-operative support, all of these things are basically the same. True, the boy would not be placed in a four by six cage during his stay in the hospital, but a bed in a room is not all that complicated.

What accounts for the huge difference in price? A lot of people say it’s the liability insurance, but is that all there is to it? It’s not as if there’s much difference in the degree of education between an MD and a DVM. (And it’s actually harder to get into vet school than it is to get into med school, so if there’s an issue involving brains, the vets might win.)

It strikes me that there is a giant, overarching difference between veterinary care and regular medical care, and that is that the former is barely regulated by the government, while the latter is so regulated that even now — without socialized health care — many doctors feel as if they spent most of their time being bureaucrats. Is that it? I’m sure my vet kept records for Puff, but I’d be willing to bet they consisted of little more than a couple of paragraphs summarizing the diagnosis, the procedure, and his recovery. And I’d also be willing to bet that for the same procedure on a boy, if all of the records were all printed out they’d be a stack of documents inches thick.

The commenters (and there are a lot of them, thanks to a link from Instapundit) seem to mention three things that they believe contribute to the difference in prices:

• Medical insurance breaking the economic link between supply and demand,
• Willingness to let veterinary patients die if their lives would be substantially worse (or if there’s no ability to pay),
• A much subdued willingness to sue when compared to people’s propensity to sue doctors, and
• No subsidizing of patients who can’t pay (see: “letting patients die”).

Some of these things could be addressed in the (human) medical system, but some of them are politically or ethically distasteful (see: “Death Panels” and “Refusing Treatment To Those Who Can’t Pay”). The post is thought-provoking, I think, and is definitely worth a read.