Professionally, vets are in the same league as a family doctor, except that the humble MD only knows about one species of animal, while a vet has to be an expert on every kind of animal anatomy. Their education is just as rigorous and they have high professional standards.
Some of them spend their careers keeping multimillion dollar racehorses on their feet, while others keep farmers' life savings from dropping dead in the field.
If it costs $3,000 to get a vet to put poor Rover back together after a car runs him over, imagine how much your kind and generous family doctor would charge OHIP to perform exactly the same procedures on your youngest child.
I have a hard time picturing my kind and generous family doctor doing surgery but hey if we are talking just stitches and bandages I'm betting the two wouldn't be far off each other.
The extra costs when performing surgery on humans are obviously the hospital, multiple nurses, extra doctors for anethesia etc. etc. Not to mention insurance. Most vets operate in their own offices with rudimentary equipment (compared to a hospital) and one assistant that probably gets paid far less than a surgical nurse. As far as what the actual doc nets I have no idea what an Ontario surgeon actually gets per operation but there is a fixed scale set up by OHIP. A quick guess would be that, with the possible exception of brain surgery it is less than the cited example of $3,000 for a half day operation.
If it were just a question of surgery there might be less complaints, its the upselling that causes most complaints. I had two women that worked for me that owned large dogs. One was excessively timid and the other was, to be kind, overprotective of his owner and had to be leashed around strangers. Both used the same vet in town who charged them a lot for what were otherwise healthy dogs. Special lotions and potions, vitamins, teeth cleaning etc etc.
He pursuaded both women that their dogs would benefit from" doggy psychiatry" at $100 a session. He was also the shrink...lol. It took several sessions each for the women to realize that their dogs behaviour was unaffected by the "treatments". Poorer but wiser.
Sucker born every minute and he was astute at picking them out.