Paying Too Much for Eyewear?

Prescription eyewear can be a necessity to daily life for many. Those who need their vision corrected may be unable to drive, work, or read without their glasses or contacts – yet many health plans fail to provide this very necessary type of coverage. With 2BenefitU’s Vision Benefit, these out of pocket costs can be lowered.

And costly they are. According to many recent news articles, the prescription eyewear industry is ridiculously overpriced; with little regulation in the industry, those who need corrective lenses are virtually held captive by rising eyewear costs.

This is especially true for those for whom simple single vision lenses and frames won’t cut it. If you have astigmatism, need bifocal or trifocal lenses, or find yourself limited in frame selection due to thickness of lenses or other considerations, the cost can quickly double or triple.   

Prescription eyewear is currently a $64 billion industry with massive 500-percent markups. Eye doctors may tell you that you can’t have your own prescription, or may refuse to release pertinent details about your eyewear needs, such as the pupillary distance (aka PD, derived by measuring the space between your pupils with a ruler), cutting you off from cheaper deals elsewhere.

This can make it even more infuriating to get your glasses or contact lenses without paying trumped up costs. When you end up with a high pressure salesperson who assumes you need special non-scratch coating, sun reactive tint changing lenses, and the most expensive J-Lo designer frames, you can be looking at a $600 bill even for a basic pair of glasses.

To make things worse, even if you do have vision insurance, many companies pay the bare minimum and the lenses can take weeks to be ground in some remote lab. If you have kids on Medicaid plans, even eyewear stores with their own in-store lab are forced to send the lenses off to an “approved” lens grinder, and many parents end up paying cash for a pair of glasses as they are unable to wait 6-8 weeks or more for the backlog.

Thankfully there’s a better option. The Vision Benefit from 2BenefitU isn’t vision insurance, but it does provide major discounts at hundreds of opticians and eyewear retailers across the country – even the big names like LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears, Target, JC Penney, VisionWorks, and more. Doctors not in network can be nominated.

Savings range from 20-60% off of prescription eyewear, 10-40% off of contacts, 10-30% off of eye exams, 15-40% off of online options and mail order services, and even a 40-50% discount off of the average price of Lasik eye surgery.  All of this with 2BenefitU’s Vision Benefit, which covers your whole family!