Arizona animal lovers beware: Proposed merger may drive up Fido’s healthcare costs
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Elizabeth Kucinich
Submitted photo/InsideSources
Veterinary care is already stretching families to a breaking point. Prices have risen more than 60% since 2014. Gallup and PetSmart Charities found that 52% of pet owners had skipped or declined needed veterinary care. Among those who skipped, seven in 10 cited cost. Ninety-four percent of veterinarians say clients’ finances sometimes or often prevent them from providing recommended treatment.”
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OPINION — Just when you thought the cost of healthcare couldn’t rise any further, they’re coming for our pets.
Covetrus and MWI Animal Health are names most pet owners have never heard, but they sit behind the veterinary examination room door. MWI is a major distributor of animal-health products. Covetrus operates across veterinary distribution, pharmacy services and practice-management technology. Their proposed merger, valuing MWI at $3.5 billion, would further concentrate control over the medicines, supplies and technology that veterinarians depend on.
The Federal Trade Commission is intensifying its review of the deal and has reportedly sought information from customers and competitors about its potential effect on veterinary products and practice management software. It should stop it.
Veterinary care is already stretching families to a breaking point. Prices have risen more than 60% since 2014. Gallup and PetSmart Charities found that 52% of pet owners had skipped or declined needed veterinary care. Among those who skipped, seven in 10 cited cost. Ninety-four percent of veterinarians say clients’ finances sometimes or often prevent them from providing recommended treatment.
These are families being forced to put a price on love while veterinary costs run unbridled.
My husband, former congressman Dennis Kucinich, and I know that love well. Our rescue dogs, Bunny and Gracie, are family. They rule our home, structure our days and enrich our lives beyond measure.
When an animal you love is sick or suffering, you are not an ordinary consumer shopping around for the best deal. Walking away because the price is too high hardly feels like a choice. That makes competition in animal health all the more important.
Dennis and I have spent years campaigning for healthcare reform that brings down prices, restores competition and challenges concentrated corporate power. We know this pattern. Corporations consolidate. Competition diminishes. Independent practitioners lose bargaining power. Prices become harder to challenge. And eventually the bill lands with the family who has the least power to say no.
Why would America allow the same pattern to take hold in animal health?
The companies argue their merger will make animal healthcare more affordable and accessible. That promise deserves particular scrutiny when families are already struggling to pay veterinary bills. Combining two major suppliers and asking the public to trust that greater concentration will produce greater affordability turns basic market logic on its head.
This merger also reaches beyond our pets. MWI supplies the farmed animal market. The companies describe their proposed combination as spanning the “entire animal health ecosystem,” from companion animals to production animals.
That is where my home life and my life’s work meet. I began campaigning for farm-animal welfare as a child in England, and before I was 13, I took that cause into the parliaments of London, Brussels and Luxembourg. For more than two decades, my work in Washington has focused on food, agriculture, health and animal welfare, including senior policy roles at the Center for Food Safety and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Across all of that work, I have seen the same lesson repeated: When control over the essentials of life becomes concentrated in fewer corporate hands, ordinary people, independent practitioners and farmers lose power.
Farmers have a stake in this merger. If reduced competition increases the cost of animal medicines and veterinary supplies, those costs can squeeze independent farmers and ultimately put additional pressure on food prices. Another potential cost is animal welfare. Good husbandry takes resources. Veterinary care costs money. Healthy living conditions require investment.
The animal with its head on our pillow and the animal caged on a concrete floor in a factory farm are no different in their capacity to experience pain, fear, comfort and well-being. Both equally deserve compassionate care and treatment. When competition disappears, the economic squeeze reaches them both.
This is precisely the kind of market concentration our antitrust laws were created to prevent. The FTC needs to do its job. Protect competition. Protect the free market. Block this merger.
Elizabeth Kucinich is a human and ecological-security specialist and longtime food, health and animal-welfare policy advocate. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.
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