Examining the Evidence Behind Anti-Corporate Veterinary Legislation

In a column for Today’s Veterinary Business, Mark Cushing takes on the recurring legislative push to restrict corporate and private equity ownership of veterinary practices, arguing that critics have yet to produce documented evidence of harm to animals, pet owners, or veterinary professionals. Cushing walks through the basic mechanics of corporate investment — outside capital in exchange for clinic management, with clinical decisions remaining in the veterinarian’s hands — before surveying the current legislative landscape, where roughly 18 states prohibit corporate ownership and recent bills in Colorado, Texas, Arizona, and New York have failed or stalled. He details what those proposals would have done, from Texas’s SB 613 restricting specific aspects of practice management to Arizona’s HB 4019 requiring majority veterinarian ownership and empowering the attorney general to pursue penalties, and notes that trade associations including the Texas and Colorado VMAs opposed the measures while the AVMA declined to take a position. Cushing contrasts the rhetorical power of the phrase “private equity” with the absence of sector-specific outcome data, and looks abroad for alternatives: the UK’s focus on pricing transparency, Germany’s evidence-based competition review, and ownership restrictions in Ireland. He concludes that European models grounded in price transparency and market analysis elevate the conversation beyond political rhetoric, and that legislation targeting ownership structure amounts to a solution in search of a problem at a time when the profession faces genuine challenges.