Yvette Ramos raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth in a West Roxbury courtroom on a recent fall day.
The Canton single mother was facing a civil lawsuit in small claims court for $471, a debt she owed to Angell Animal Medical Center in Jamaica Plain to care for her two dogs.
At the informal trial, Ramos told a clerk magistrate that an attorney for the hospital had just offered to help her set up a payment plan — but she simply couldn’t afford to pay.
“I have no income, so there is no way I’m going to be able to cover the debt,” she said, sitting with her preschool-aged daughter. “Also one of the pets in question has passed.”
A growing number of pet owners in Massachusetts and across the nation are struggling to afford health care for their dogs, cats and birds amid increasing costs and tightening budgets. These debts are often placed on credit cards, and may be set aside as other bills take precedence, veterinarians and pet advocates say.
But only a small subset of pet owners end up in court for their debts — mostly because few veterinary hospitals treat people without requiring them to pay up front. Their stories, seen in Massachusetts court filings, show some of the struggles people have in caring for their companion animals.
Karen Leslie, executive director of The Pet Fund, a national nonprofit that helps people pay for pet care, says she has seen an increase in calls from people seeking help across the country over the past year, from about 200 to 300 a day.
Some 22% of pet owners carry more than $2,000 in pet-related debt, according to arecent report by MetLife Pet Insurance. About one in seven pet owners experience what is known as “pet poverty” — a situation where they can’t meet both their basic needs and those of a companion animal, the report said.
“We’re getting hundreds of emails per day from people who are losing their jobs or have lost their jobs, who now have a dire situation with veterinary care that they can’t afford,” she said. “Lawsuits are uncommon. What is common is just that the pet owner ends up with thousands of dollars in debt.”
Then there are those in Massachusetts facing court cases for their unpaid debts. Ramos is one of about 650 people who have been sued by the animal hospital run by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals since 2023, according to data obtained by the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting. The MSPCA defended the practice, saying it’s necessary as costs rise for health care providers, too.
Defendants have been sued for as little as $300 to more than $5,000, court records show. The number of such lawsuits has jumped in recent years — with the last three years of lawsuits more than double the total of the three years before.
GBH News spoke to more than a dozen people who were sued over the last several years. Among them, a Dorchester student facing a nearly $800 bill she owed to the center for her caring for her pet parrot and a Marshfield woman sued for about $1,500 over care for a family dog, money she said she thought would be covered by financial aid.
Some pet owners said they had not been adequately notified before their case ended up in court. Others said they didn’t know they could seek financial aid or were unaware they had been sued at all, until a reporter reached out.
For those who show up at all, going to small claims court can mean taking time off of work and finding child care — and a court judgment against these defendants can affect their credit scores, as interest mounts on the unpaid debt.
Several consumer advocates told GBH News they believed the MSPCA is aggressive in its debt collection practices — both by suing people for relatively small amounts of money and fighting decisions in court that didn’t go their way.
“It definitely doesn’t comport with the public image that people have of MSPCA, where people trust the MSPCA and they go to bring their animals there for their care,” said Kristen Bor-Zale, a staff attorney with the Greater Boston Legal Services. “It feels like a breach of trust for clients.”
Daiana Rodriguez of Marshfield believes she was misinformed by the hospital about what financial aid would cover.
Rodriguez and her mother-in-law went to the Angell Animal Medical Center in 2023 for help with the family Shih-poo, named Lila, who hadn’t been eating.
She said a doctor told her they could qualify for financial aid to do some tests. The two women were grateful for the help, Rodriguez said, and told the doctor they didn’t have money to cover additional costs.
Weeks later, she said she received a call from the hospital that she owed money. Thinking it was a misunderstanding, Rodriguez explained what she had been told. But the caller insisted.
She refused to pay and two years later, she received notice in the mail that she was being sued to pay back nearly $1,500, including legal costs.
A courtroom conflict
In October, Rodriguez went to court to tell her story.
“We knew that she was obviously very sick, and they were saying she had cancer,’’ she told the clerk magistrate. “I was shocked that there was a bill. I thought that everything was good.”
Representing the hospital was Michael Magerer, a Needham attorney who has been handling small claims lawsuits for MSPCA for nearly 30 years.
Magerer told GBH News that he tries to work with anybody willing to pay their debts. But in the end, he said, his mission is to protect the MSPCA, which costs about $123 million every year to run.
He said he regularly files about 10 lawsuits a week in the West Roxbury court, which is near the animal hospital, and most defendants fail to show up at all. MSPCA has filed more than 4,600 lawsuits over the last 20 years, according to data obtained by GBH News with the help of student researchers from Boston University.
“Angell is a great organization. It’s great people. They do terrific work. They care,’’ Magerer said after leaving the courtroom recently. But: “They’re a business. They have bills to pay, just like everybody else.”
MSPCA officials said clients who leave with an outstanding balance are contacted within 30 days with at least one phone call and two mailed invoices. They will also generally send a “formal collection letter.” If the client doesn’t respond, they’ll send the balances to Magerer.
“Angell has pretty much, figuratively speaking, beaten it to death in terms of trying to collect it,’’ he said.
Magerer told the clerk magistrate that — contrary to Rodriguez’s testimony — the animal hospital never promises to pay a pet owner’s full debt. He said financial aid usually kicks in after owners pay their portion.
“They would have never been told, Mr. Clerk, that the financial assistance would pay 100%,’’ he said. “It’s not something that’s done.”
A few weeks later, the clerk ruled in favor of Rodriguez: the family was off the hook for the claim.
Magerer filed a motion to vacate the court decision, calling it a “gross miscarriage of justice,” court records show. He told GBH News that Rodriguez “made up a story and lied” to the court.
Rodriguez says she has no doubts about what she’d been told by the MSPCA’s veterinarian. “I know what I heard that day,’’ she said.
Bor-Zale, the consumer rights attorney, said the MSPCA’s decision to ask the court to vacate the decision is extremely unusual in small claims court, where appeals by a plaintiff in most cases are not allowed.
”The travesty of justice is that plaintiffs are using this space, they’re benefiting from it, and then they are trying to appeal from it and to continue to have hearings until they get the result they want,” she said.
Magerer maintains he has the legal right to fight court judgments and stands by his work. “I am proud of my representation of Angell over the years and having lived up to the high bar that Angell has set in the care and treatment of animals,” he said.
‘Veterinarian care in general is going up’
A tour of Angell Animal Medical Center shows a place where animals have the chance for first-class care, including CT scans and other medical equipment often seen in human hospitals. Veterinarians and technicians work hand in hand, caring for animals at both the hospital and adjacent adoption center.
MSPCA officials told GBH News that they need to collect money from people who use their services to help fund their nonprofit that provides care to more than 110,000 animals a year.
Megan Whelan, chief medical officer of the hospital, says legal claims represent a tiny fraction of the cases that the hospital cares for in its main hospital and community clinics.
“The hospital has to earn money to pay for itself to stay open,’’ she said, after giving GBH News reporters an hour-long tour of their main facility. ”Veterinarian care in general is going up — to pay the staff, salaries for assistants and technicians are going up — so those costs have to go somewhere.”
Unlike for humans, there aren’t government resources to help pet owners cover medical care for their animals. But pet owners need to proactively ask for help, Whelan said. The hospital can’t assume needs and can’t absorb all costs.
“If everything was free, everybody would come here,’’ she said. “When someone says, ‘I have zero funds,’ then we are talking about a whole different ballgame. Then maybe you should euthanize your pet if it is really that ill.”
Harrison Stenson, insurance and donor fund coordinator at the MSPCA, said fewer pet owners are coming in for routine care. He traces the origins of the problem back to the pandemic: Many people got pets when they had free time and more money from stimulus checks to care for animals. If they skip regular checkups for their pets, he says owners going to animal hospitals often end up with more expensive treatments.
If owners say they can’t afford treatments, the MSPCA offers funding — mainly through its Pet Care Assistance Fund — that can reimburse up to half of a bill, hospital officials said, generally up to $1,500. Angell says they subsidize more than $1 million a year in care for sick, injured or homeless pets. Financial aid, if available, is generally limited to one occasion — so it won’t be available time and again for pets with an ongoing health issue, like recurring cancer treatments.
Stenson joins other veterinarians in the area who recommend that people get pet insurance before their animals get sick, because most insurance doesn’t cover preexisting conditions.
“People are shocked to find out how expensive vet care can cost,’’ he said. “We don’t want anybody to have to put their pet to sleep or to have to give their pet away because of financial reasons when it’s otherwise avoidable.”
Elizabeth Sanchez said she had pet insurance, but her policy didn’t cover the treatments for her Quaker parrot named Fendi.
Sanchez said she took her bird to Angell in 2023 for help when he started to pull his feathers out. But she was told insurance wouldn’t pay because the bird’s symptoms were not caused by an emergency, but instead by day-to-day stress.
For months, she said she paid for medication to help her bird, racking up several thousands of dollars in debt before she had to seek less expensive health solutions. Fendi got better, she said, but she ended up with a bill of about $700 she let slide: she had other bills piling up, like the costs of school and renting her Dorchester apartment.
She wants to pay her bill, but says she was surprised that a bill of that size would result in a lawsuit.
“When I first got the letter in the mail, I was going crazy,’’ she said. “If you are taking me to court, what’s next, giving you my bird?”
Yvette Ramos told GBH News she understood the MSPCA needs to get paid — but also didn’t understand why it made sense to bring her to court for such a small amount.
She told the clerk magistrate that she just couldn’t afford to pay the nearly $700 debt, which was higher than her initial bill due to legal costs. The clerk told her that because of her low income, she wouldn’t have to pay immediately. However, the clerk magistrate explained, Ramos’ debt would be recorded in a court judgment, and the debt would increase by 12% each year.
Magerer said in court that he’d be willing to waive some interest if Ramos voluntarily offered to start paying off the debt anyway.
Now she’s worried how a court judgment could affect her credit and ability to rent a new home if needed. She said when she first took him in for care, she told the staff she couldn’t pay but she wasn’t offered any financial aid when she first went in.
“I probably wouldn’t be here today if I did because I would have asked them about it,’’ she said. “I did not have money to pay and I made it very clear when I came in.”
GBH News intern Azusa Lippit contributed reporting. Data collection for this story was provided by Civera. Data analysis was provided by student researcher Ta-Chi Lin through Boston University’s Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences’ SPARK! Program.
Do you have a story to tell about pet debt? Email the investigative team at investigations@wgbh.org.
