OT: A Humble Request on Behalf of a Little Michigan Fan

was well into the double digits while consumer price index was sitting at 1-2%, right? So even if taken as true, a 500% increase would be a lower cost curve than health inflation generally. I'm not sure why you're singling out excise tax, which is just an indirect tax that like most business taxes eventually gets passed on to consumers one way or the other.

People have health insurance who wouldn't have had it before, and that money comes from somewhere. I'm not sure what your point is. Vet care was expensive before and continues to get more expensive. So does human care. This is an odd place to discuss this but I'll confess to being curious to see what you meant by the original comment.

The ACA is a very poorly drafted law and the regulations are extremely overly-complicated. I'm not going to get into that (bluntly, reconciliation process is messy and not a good way to craft a national change in policy), but that's not really the discussion I was having here and we're teetering into the line of no politics. Frankly, I'm not debating what you seem to think I'm debating: I haven't made a single comment about the ACA marketplaces or their competitiveness. Or for that matter made my feelings known on the ACA at all.

My point was only to reflect that while the costs of veterinary care are increasing (from what I can read, at a high rate) because of the differences in the market, consumers of pet insurance are not seeing their rates increasing at the same rates as human health care based on everything I've seen and my own personal anecdotes. Again, if you have any evidence to the contrary, I'd be happy to read it and it could change my view. I concede I know very little on the prices in that market other than what I've read and power-reading the Nationwide/Perdue findings.

I may have inititally mis-read the question about whether costs of animal care "increasing exponentially" as referring specifically to pet insurance, not the entire cost of owning an animal. The costs, frankly, a very different models because included in the cost of owning an animal is usually the provision of food (among other things), which is not included in traditional human health care. Which is why I read it the way I did (e.g., human food costs are not presumed to be "increasingly expotentially" ).

But, my issue is really trying to tie the medical device excise tax to increases in veterinary care. Yes, there is overlap in devices. Yes, those devices have a tax on them. Yes, the tax is being passed on to the consumer (much like many other parts of the ACA). But there's so many other factors from an economic modeling perspective to compare the two. It's apples and oranges. There are two separate markets with a large number of variables on which the data is very different and pointing to one factor and jumping up and down seems to ignore the highly complex nature of both markets.

I'm also assuming your wife would tell you that the participation rate for insurance on a horse is higher than that of a household pet, such as a cat or a dog? That of course, can impact pet insurance costs (the animal, the risk pool, the type of injuries and treatment that needs to occur, etc.).