Contact cronies

What if your doctor prescribed Medicine X and you were not allowed, by law, to substitute a generic equivalent? What if your doctor has a financial relationship with the drug company whose meds he has prescribed for you?

Your “choice” is: Buy the name-brand drug pimped by the doctor at full mark-up … or do without.

Outrageous?

Without doubt.

But perfectly legal … when it comes to contact lenses.

The law requires us to obtain a prescription from an optometrist in order to buy contacts — an oddity, given that unlike drugs, contact lenses aren’t meds. You can’t OD on them or sell them on the street. Yet they are treated as if they were a controlled substance.

But the truly weird thing is that the prescriptions written for contacts are brand-specific.

When a doctor writes a scrip for a drug, he is writing a scrip for the drug generally, not necessarily a specific brand of drug. You have the option at the pharmacists of choosing the name-brand version of the drug or (if available) a lower-cost generic equivalent.

This option doesn’t exist when it comes to contacts because of the legal requirement of brand-specificity.

You could get a different prescription from another eye doctor … but your insurance probably will not cover this. Even if the cost of a second exam and a new prescription is covered, you’re basically in the same position as before: You will be issued a prescription that’s brand-specific.

Take it or leave it.

No soup for you!

Congress tried to fix this back in ’03 when it passed the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act. The legislation did not end the brand-specific prescription requirement, but it did make it a bit easier to shop prices at different retailers by requiring optometrists to issue multiple copies of each prescription, if requested by the patient.

You still had to go with the same brand, but it was possible Wal-Mart (as an example) might sell you a set for less than Costco.

But why not let people simply get an exam and then shop for the best price on contacts, irrespective of the brand?

They’re allowed to do this when it comes to prescription drugs, and no harm appears to have come from it.

Besides which, we are allegedly “free” people. And grown-ups, too. What business is it of the government’s to tell us that we must buy a certain manufacturer’s product? Deny us our right to choose for ourselves?

Who are these people? (Cue second Seinfeld reference).

It’s already legal to buy reading glasses on our own, and without all the folderol. At almost any drug store, there is a rack of reading glasses, and an eye chart nearby. You use the eye chart to figure out what strength lens you need, then pick a pair that suits.

Few injuries have been reported. No one appears to have died. Or even complained about a headache.

There is no law dictating that you must have a prescription or that you have to buy this particular brand of reading glasses. In Europe and Japan, it works the same way for contact lenses, too.

People are presumed to be grown-ups and capable of figuring out what they need without being told by Big Brother what they must have.

A Big Brother who seems to be working for the Benefit of Big Business.

Johnson & Johnson, the 800-pound gorilla of the contact lens industry, is one of the crony capitalist entities trying to peel back even the modest market-minded reforms enacted by the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act.

New legislation, the Contact Lens Consumer Health Protection Act, aims to make it much harder for people to shop around for the best deal on contacts. For example, the proposed law would require that no sale could be completed until the prescribing doctor “verifies” the prescription (the one he already issued) via dedicated phone lines/e-mail servers… with no time limit for a response.

By simply not responding to a verification request from a contact lens seller — a different one than the doctor tried to steer the patient to originally — he can stall the sale indefinitely. The patient’s choice is then to give up and buy the brand-name lens specified in the prescription or get another prescription from another doctor… and try again.

The bleat issuing from the contact lens crony capitalists is that their de facto monopoly is necessary for the sake of public health. They are merely looking out for us, as if we were idiot children unable to capably make such decisions ourselves.

But there is no Contact Lens Crisis in Europe or Japan; no epidemic of near or far-sightedness.

Just less hassle — and lower prices.

The irony is that this is America, supposedly, an economically freer market than the socialist economies of Europe and Japan. And yet Americans have less real choice, and pay more, when it comes to contacts.

Probably, because there’s a lot of money on the table.

The contact lens industry is a $4 billion annually industry.

And the industry’s 800-pound gorillas — Johnson & Johnson, specifically — want to make as much money as they can.

Nothing’s wrong with that, provided they are not making it through coercion and cronyism.

That’s the issue here.

The contact industry’s kahunas would still make plenty of money if the laws were changed to make things more market – and so, consumer – friendly.

Maybe a bit less money. But it would be honest money. Earned rather than coerced.

That’s how it’s supposed to work in America … right?

Eric Peters is an automotive journalist and author. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.