Today I took my little Persian cat, Riley, for a check-up. This was Riley's first visit to his new veterinarian at Prevost Animal Hospital. Riley's story was posted on the Watchdog News back in 2004 when he was misdiagnosed as being positive feline leukemia.

http://animaladvocates.com/cgi-bin/newsroom.pl/noframes/read/6972

Little Riley has been on eye medication since we took him in. There are some great vets around who really take time and this one spent a lot of time on him. We changed vets since the Marketplace programme revealed that mark-ups on medications purchased at veterinary hospitals were so excessive.

http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2007/11/28/cat_got_your_wallet/

The vet thought that Riley didn't even need eye ointment as his eye ulcers were not active. So he will no longer be having them on a daily basis after all these years. He will be watched carefully, of course. The veterinarian offered us a prescription just in case there were any changes. He said it was a human medication and that it would be cheaper for us to buy it at a drug store.

So off we went to good old Costco!

We paid $30.19 at the vet's office for 5MG of the eye ointment. The cost at Costco was $8.53 with a fee of $4.49 for a cost of $13.02.

That saved us $17.17. That means that the vet was charging us about 132% more than Costco did. Thanks to Marketplace for tackling this difficult subject!

Many owners will be able to keep their animals longer if there are some controls on medication costs and if vets are forced to offer prescriptions. As it is, some veterinarians will offer them, but others will not even tell you that it is your right to get one. Let’s hope for some government action to control mark-ups here in Canada, just as there is in England.