They’re Coming for Our Pets – Inside Sources

Just when you thought the cost of health care couldn’t rise any further, they’re coming for our pets.

Covetrus and MWI Animal Health are names most pet owners will never have heard of, 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 approximately $3.5 billion, would further concentrate control over the medicines, supplies and technology veterinarians depend upon.

The Federal Trade Commission is intensifying its review of the deal and has reportedly sought information from customers and competitors about its potential impact on veterinary products and practice management software. It should stop it.

Veterinary care is already stretching American families to 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 Dennis, former congressman 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 health care 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 health care 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 as well. The companies themselves 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 had taken 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 too. 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. And there is another potential cost: 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 are equally deserving of 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.