This weekend, my son got his first prescription for glasses.
My wife saw his face as the optometrist handed him a sentence in 12 point print to read unassisted, and then with the proper prescription in front of his eyes. Everything became sooooo much easier and clearer.
We will be getting him two pairs; a good pair for day to day use and a cheap back-up pair as he is seven and prone to lose and break things.
He’ll be able to see well on a regular basis some time next week.
Our vision insurance is paying for most of the costs. We have about $200 in copays and deductibles that we are responsible for. My wife put the charges on the debit card and handed me the receipts. I took them into work this morning, scanned everything in, sacrificed a small hoofed animal to the IT gods, and filed for a Health Reimbursement Account repayment.
So some time next week, my son will have glasses, and our society, in the form of a tax deduction, will be paying for about $40 of those glasses.
Thank you!
However this is absurd.
My wife and I are doing well. Yet, given how we, as a society, funnel help through the tax code in the form of deductions and exemptions, we get more help in our 2020 scenario than in our 2011 scenario where we were earning no more than half as much as we are on track to make for 2020.
If we are making a societal wide decision that people should get some help to pay for glasses for their kids, there is no coherent reason why my 2020 self should get more help than my 2012 self. There are very straightforward arguments that my 2012 self should get more help (declining marginal utility of the dollar means that my 2012 self valued that dollar a whole lot more than my 2020 self) and some slightly more complex arguments as well. But I can’t think of a strong policy argument in favor of my 2020 self getting more help than my 2012 self.
sam
just as an FYI as a middle aged person who has worn glasses since she was six, your son is so lucky to get this diagnosis in the era of relatively inexpensive frames and internet sources for decent-looking glasses. I say this as someone who grew up in the era when there was a true monopoly on glasses selling, and ALL of the options, particularly for kids, were really effing ugly. And OMG if you broke something? it was a true nightmare.
I generally go to warby parker these days, but I know people who get the super cheap frames/glasses at places like zenni and eyebuy direct, precisely because they have kids and need glasses that can be replaced easily when damaged.
mrmoshpotato
Seeing clearly is a wonderful thing.
1 or 2? 2
3 or 4? 3
Villago Delenda Est
I remember my first pair of glasses. Putting them on and seeing things in sharp focus was AMAZING. Before that I thought everyone saw distant objects a bit fuzzy. Good luck to your son.
mrmoshpotato
@sam: And lenses aren’t damn Coke bottles anymore.
dnfree
And as you know, this is one of the problems with glibly saying “Medicare for all”. I’m on Medicare, and it doesn’t cover either vision or dental, both of which can be significant expenses for older people. I have a fairly expensive supplement plan that also doesn’t cover vision or dental. Some people have Advantage plans with some coverage, but the trade off is a much smaller network of providers than I have. (I can go anywhere that accepts Medicare.).
So the idea that M4A will be able to cover everyone for everything with no out of pocket and no deductible and no network…doesn’t seem remotely plausible. Does it? Do people just not understand the limits of Medicare?
mrmoshpotato
@dnfree:
Probably, seeing as how most of the country isn’t on Medicare (yet).
VOR
Eyeglasses are an amazing thing where the effective price has gone down, adjusting for inflation. I got my first glasses around age 7 and broke/lost pairs. My parents were always upset that an expensive (at the time) item had to be replaced. There have been big advances in materials and fabrication technology over the years. Polycarbonate lenses. Titanium frames. You can buy a pair of kid’s glasses from a discount vendor like America’s Best for under $100. Sure, fancy features like auto-darkening (photochromatic), anti-fog, anti-scratch coating, etc… cost more.
Decent eye care and being able to read properly do a lot to improve individual quality of life. I can see the case for society wanting to help. I agree there doesn’t seem to be a reason why 2020 gets more help, other than a realization of the importance of proper vision.
kindness
Keep the prescription handy. If you run out of the 2 pair you get your son, Costco does a really good job relatively cheaply.
David Anderson
My comment on 2020 vs 2012 is a comment that I’m making a lot more money now than I was in 2012 but I get a lot more help from society on both an absolute dollar basis and a percentage basis now compared to then.
Chris Johnson
@David Anderson: That’s absolutely normal. It happens on every level of society. I would say get used to it, except it’d be nice if we fixed that.
I’ve fought my way along until I got some inherited money so I am now both more calm (and less likely to flip out about stuff, which I did a lot around 2016) and more able to do things like pay fuel bills all at once for a substantial discount, get side income from bank accounts with interest (still uncomfortable about getting into that situation though) and so on.
Your experience is super normal for America. It’s how basically everything works. Everything that you do will be like that in some way or another, sometimes very strikingly so. My advice: take full advantage of it but then use your growing wealth for good? I’m dedicating myself to making music/audio tech available to people at cost, to the extent that I have superfluous money. While also trying to prop up my life so it costs way less to live (I don’t know, solar, stuff like that. More efficient appliances that won’t break).
Don’t be surprised. Everything about your experience here is normal in 2020 America. It goes the other way too: if you lost a bunch of money, you’d start getting pecked to death for more of it.
Cathie from Canada
Just came here to join the crowd saying what a life-changing event it was to get glasses when I was 9. Before that I hadn’t realized what everyone else was seeing.
One of the things our medicare in Canada has never covered is optometrists and eye exams. Sp in retrospect I’m glad my parents could afford to get glasses for me – and later my sister and brother too of course.
Sturgeonmouth
I’ve had nothing but good experiences with Zenni.com. I keep buying the same $7 frames so that I always have spare parts. Regular polycarbonate glasses end up around $20 and prescription polarized sunglasses are about $40. The sunglasses really changed my life. I spend most of my time outdoors. With prescription sunglasses this cheap, there is no point in wearing contact lenses with regular sunglasses.
Eolirin
I’m pretty sure that the policy argument is “Fuck poor people” and it seems to resonate pretty strongly with a fairly large percentage of the electorate.
indycat32
@dnfree: I live in Indianapolis and have Medicare Advantage through IU Health. The premium is the standard medicare amount of $135/month. For that I get access to great doctors, no co-pay for doctor visits, prescription coverage (I’m not on any meds), vision, hearing (not needed), free gym membership, and an extra $14/month gets me dental coverage. If I travel out of network I’m covered. So for me, MA is great. For others, not so much.
soup time
@Sturgeonmouth:
+1 Zenni
I have three sets of glasses from Zenni, the most expensive was $25. They are as good as the $300 glasses I used to get.
TupeloPhoney
I think this* is where the a-holes are supposed to say: “hur dur if you don’t like it feel free to give some of your money to the government! har har [but keep your hands off my hard-earned &c.]”
*i.e. whenever someone with means points out a relative injustice, like when Warren Buffet has a lower tax rate than his admin
Sure Lurkalot
@dnfree: Medicare Advantage is crap and was invented to undermine Medicare. It’s doing a decent job of it.
I did find that my Medigap insurer and AARP participate in discount programs for vision care. I saved about 15% on some high end specs.
The last time I had decent dental coverage was 2 or 3 decades ago.
It’s a conundrum that our exceptional country hasn’t figured out how to implement a comprehensive health care system that doesn’t dice the population into different baskets of suboptimal coverage. M4A may not be the right moniker, but some 35 or so countries have a variety of solutions that I would love to live under
@dnfree:
Ohio Mom
I also remember the childhood thrill of a new pair of glasses. Since my eyes grew more near-sighted year after year, I got to experience that thrill many times.
I also broke my glasses with some regularity. Thanks to my mom’s teacher’s union, two pairs a year were covered. Whew!
As a beginner oldster, my eyes have continued to evolve in complicated ways. I’m taking a med for RA that can damage your retina so frequent retina exams are a must. I’ve developed corneal dystrophy so I have a cornea specialist now.
As I understand it, Medicare will pay for the specialists, just not for glasses.
I can’t help but think it’s dangerous not to be able to see well when the correct glasses would make that possible. And not to be able to hear well when hearing aids would make that possible. There must be research showing these Medicare exclusions are penny-wise and pound-foolish. If not, there should be.
Back to the original post’s premise: the poor have always paid more for an awful lot of things. It’s something anyone paying attention to gets reminded of over and over.
In my suburb, the glaring example is housing. My mortgage is a lot less than rent of a comparable but smaller apartment in my neighborhood.
But other example also abound.
polyorchnid octopunch
I know a lot of people hate him (and there’s good reasons for that) but this louis ck bit pretty much explains why 2020 you gets more help than 2012 you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_-1l_SlA7c
polyorchnid octopunch
@dnfree: I view M4A as a way of expressing an aspiration, more than a complete program, in a way that many many people will understand.
Ohio Mom
What I left out: when your eyes areas complicated as mine, you can’t just order your glasses online. You need a very thorough exam to find the right prescription and then an ace optician to check that the lens were manufacture correctly. Mine sent my last pair back for a redo.
Jager
A high school friend’s dad was an optometrist, he was an Army eye doc in WWII, continued his education after the war on the GI Bill. In the 50s and 60s, he had a suite of offices in a bank building, 3 or 4 employees. He was the first contact lens doc in my home town, he made a ton of money. My vain HS girlfriend got contacts from him in 63. I can remember her dad bitching about the 300 dollar (2400 in today’s money) plus cost. When I was playing HS hockey I started to have vision problems, astigmatism. Regular glasses $150, heavy duty “sports” glasses, just over 200. I ran in to the eye docs daughter a few years ago, Susan said, “Today my dad would be working for Walmart.”
gene108
@dnfree:
People don’t understand how complicated existing Medicare is and how expensive it can get, when buy all the parts you need to cover what’s wrong with you.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@dnfree: There’s a dentist at the office we go to who thinks that she’s a personal care physician. She finally stopped hassling me when I acidly told her that I would tell her all about everything when my medical insurance started paying for the visit.
I get that the specialties are intertwined, all affecting one another in my body, but I’m not paying my dentist to second-guess my PCP.
Nicole
@sam:
A thousand times this. I’ve worn glasses since I was 8, and I love seeing all the cute frames kids wear today, since mine were HORRIBLE. Kids have options now. I’m glad.
My 9-year-old, who inherited his dad’s excellent eyes (thank goodness) has expressed a desire for glasses, because he thinks they look cool. Ha! There’s something you NEVER would have heard from my cohort growing up. Hooray for cheap frames and better designs!
Kelly
One of my grandsons got glasses at age 7. The first two years he broke 8 pairs. I recommend you get a few simple hard containers for breakable stuff. When we take the kids down to the swimming hole I have a 3 gallon plastic bucket with a Gamma Seal lid that is the designated container for glasses, sunglasses, goggles, my camera, phones etc. I have a small Pelican box for when we’re rafting and to carry in my pack.
Jager
@Nicole: I broke my regular glasses and had to wear my hockey “googles” to class for 4 days so I could read the damn black board. The head strap was a real treat.
Sloegin
Our society generally agrees that children and adults should get some help with glasses. However, help for kids needing hearing aids? Eff ’em.
(Viewpoint of a once young person who’s needed hearing aids since middle school, and who realized at a very early age that the U.S. hearing-aid industry is mostly designed around the model of extraction of wealth from the elderly.)
Nicole
@Jager:
I feel for younger you, but I genuinely laughed out loud when I read this. I kept my glasses in okay shape through school (being thoroughly and totally inept at anything athletic helped), but I spent the first year conveniently forgetting them on weekends because I hated them so much. I missed seeing a lot of stuff.
RobNYNY
@Villago Delenda Est: Until I got my first glasses at age 6, I didn’t know that you could see birds in flight.
JaneE
Welcome to the world of American exceptionalism. The more money you have, the more freebies you get. Barely keep enough money in the checking account to cover the bills, and the bank charges you every month for the privilege. Keep beaucoup bucks in a checking account and the bank may even pay you a very tiny bit of interest with no fees. If you don’t need any help, you get lots of it. If you are working or middle class you pay a much larger percentage of your income in tax than the head of your company. No wonder the rest of the world thinks Americans are crazy.
Amir Khalid
Completely off-topic, but Malaysia’s 94 year old PM Dr Mahathir resigned suddenly on Monday, throwing the ruling Pakatan Harapan coalition government into turmoil. The Yang di Pertuan Agung (king) has accepted his resignation but appointed him caretaker PM until a new one can be appointed or a general election called. Deputy PM Anwar Ibrahim will have a job putting a majority together so that Pakatan Harapan can continue in power. Dr Mahathir’s party has left the coalition, and so have other parties who oppose Anwar assuming power.
Oy.
Ruckus
@sam:
Yep. I started wearing glasses almost 60 yrs ago. The exam wasn’t really any different than today. The machine used to look through and change test lens to check exactly what I needed looks to be exactly the same machine. But the cost of a pair of glasses is way less. Now some of that is way glasses are made today. Plastic lens are far cheaper and with the right kind of plastic even last longer. Thousands of plastic lenses can be made in the time and for the cost of grinding one set of glass lenses. The lens weighs less. The ability to make the plastic lens molds did but was far too crude and slow to help much and the plastic used in glasses didn’t exist.
So that’s some of the cost difference in glasses over the last 6 decades, better products and production that didn’t exist.
On a side note, I got laser surgery almost 25 yrs ago and didn’t need prescription glasses, prescription sunglasses, annually. And my insurance at the time paid for it. The doc told me that only two companies in the state that he knew of had insurance that paid for laser surgery. They stopped paying when people started finding out and using the benefit. But age has of course gotten me to having to wear glasses – again. 2 yrs ago.
Brachiator
@Cathie from Canada:
Is there supplemental insurance available for this?
Hungry Joe
As a senior (***SIGH***) I have a similar gripe about Senior Discounts. Why should we pay less to get into a movie or a play, for example, than college kids, or someone who is just young and struggling, or … anyone, really? Is it a reward for not having croaked yet? These discounts probably started pre-Medicare/War on Poverty, when the the percentage of seniors in poverty was a lot higher than now.
I’ve decided — right this minute! — to decline the discount next time (will be “Once Were Brothers,” a documentary about The Band) and ask the ticket-taker to ring up a Senior ticket to the next young person in line. I sure would have appreciated that, back in the Ramen-for-Dinner day.
Leto
Yeah: stop being lazy/poor. Work harder. Find a better job. Go back to school and “retrain”. You shouldn’t have picked a liberal arts major. You shouldn’t have gone to college and racked up that debt. You shouldn’t have had kids. You should move to a better job market.
Just getting the straightforward arguments from 20forever till now out of the way. /s (sorry, shit day and it’s 1000% sarcasm coming out)
Another Scott
I just got some progressives from eyebuydirect. Very happy with them. And about 1/3 the price I paid about 5 years ago.
I haven’t even thought about trying to claim part of the expenses on my insurance. I know too many people need to do so, and that’s part of their compensation so they should have no qualms about doing so, but it’s not worth the time for me.
Yes, progress is good and wonderful. But paperwork multiplies and is going to strangle us all if we don’t elect sensible people to do something about it.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@dnfree:
A lot of people seem to think that Medicare pays for everything. As you know, it doesn’t. We don’t pay for eye/hearing care in the US, as if you don’t need vision or hearing. Both of which, when they don’t work properly are impediments to normal life. I do not understand the logic about this. Or actually the lack of logic. Is it possible that we couldn’t have done much about it when the concept of health insurance was set up? Glasses were expensive 50-60 yrs ago, costing far more than they do today for reasons I explained above. Hearing aids were crude and expensive. But things have changed a lot over the last half century. Except our entire health care insurance industry. Maybe because health care insurance isn’t about creating better health but in making better profits for health care insurance companies/stockholders.
Ruckus
@Leto:
Don’t be sorry. That’s not sarcasm, it’s reality of the way our healthcare system is a little about health and a lot about money. It’s not even how much it costs, it’s how much is profit. I’m not saying that people should do health care for free but if your entire business is about profit and not about the product, you aren’t doing it right. But profit being the first, last and top priority over product, at every step of the way, of many/most/all of our issues in this country is the problem. There is a better way but then the people that don’t need glasses will have to pay what, 50 cents a year for the people that do, who also pay that 50 cents. It’s priorities and worth that we give to people – basically bigotry, that is the basis and how much profit we can make off of any group that is the problem.
sam
@mrmoshpotato: well, that’s really relative. I get the “extra thin” lenses and they’re…still pretty thick :)
Aardvark Cheeselog
“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer: it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.”
Ruckus
@David Anderson:
I got that but I think that there is also a much bigger picture point here. Look at how many of us on this little blog have worn glasses since we were kids, and we haven’t been kids for just a bit of time. Many of us know what it cost then and what it costs now.
When I was 24 I worked 1pm to 10:30pm. Just southeast of downtown LA. Closest supermarket was on the edge of Watts, south central LA. My coworker and I used to go there occasionally to get food – no prepared food places were open past lunchtime. We are both white and lived 25 miles away from work in suburban socal. The local market was a chain, had an armed security guard, and literally almost no food on the shelves. The little produce there looked like it was taken from supermarkets where we lived after they could no longer sell it and sold at markets like this one. And the kicker? Everything was about 25-50% more expensive.
The people who could afford it least were expected to pay the most. And treated the worst.
Nothing has really changed in that in the last [50] 500 yrs.
Monala
One thing I appreciate about my insurer is that they pay 100% for glasses for kids under 18.
Which helps since they pay only $100 for adult glasses, and since I have such a strong prescription, mine are frigging expensive.
gene108
@Ruckus:
You let providers off the hook. They are more of a problem than insurance companies
Providers are the ones driving up costs for the last 50 years, and creating a situation, where we pay more insurance premiums for worse coverage.
Insurance companies get all the blame, but providers should not escape notice.
Nicole
The discussion about rich getting things more cheaply than the poor calls directly back to the documentary I just re-watched this weekend about the credit industry- “Maxed Out.” I tracked it down on YouTube because I was thinking recently about how, after I saw it, I yapped to my husband about this lady professor from Harvard who was in it and did a really good job explaining things, although I couldn’t remember her name (I learned it again in 2012, when she ran for Senate).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nzwXXOcGtA
Lord knows how long it’ll be up before being taken down, but if you have the 2 hours, it’s really, really good, and it doesn’t appear to be streamable right now.
Nicole
@Monala:
Yeah, ours offers $200 towards glasses, but as I am now in progressives and prefer not to have them be coke-bottle thick, mine still end up being $$$ for us. :(
burnspbesq
@Ruckus:
poverty has always been expensive in this country.
And as to Dave’s point, tax benefits are less visible than cash transfer payments, so Congress has always used the Internal Revenue Code to accomplish a wide variety of social goals that would be harder to accomplish if they were done out in the open. Encouraging home ownership, charitable giving, and retirement savings are the three biggest examples, but they are far from the only ones.
because we still have progressive rates on the individual side, a deduction is worth more (and a credit is worth way more) the more income you have.
Ruckus
@gene108:
Wasn’t my point exactly but you are correct. It’s not that I was excluding providers but that we have a payment system that is only about providing money, at a high price, for something that everyone might be in dire need of but who most will use a bit of. We are pre-loaning money that hopefully most people will never need and some will need far more of. It is a very wasteful system that hurts most the people who can afford it least. Or not at all. And as humans, not just the US, we leave out parts of the overall health picture that would improve life dramatically for many and benefit the few.
If you read carefully you will hear that my writing sounds a lot like what is written about communism, which is equal everything for all. Except that humans run communism like everything else they do, which is whatever is better for me, and fuck everyone else, which is exactly the way we run capitalism. l think we can do far better. I think we were headed for better earlier in my life, but those who think that whatever they can take and have more than others makes them better. That’s trump’s concept, whatever he can take, legally or not is his and makes him better. How different is he than say our system of healthcare and healthcare insurance other than degree?
We can poke around the edges of individual segments of our society, healthcare for example, or we can recognize that there are deep flaws in humanity and at least try to make adjustments for that. We’ve done that before, with our tax structure, with unions, we do it with laws about gay rights or abortion or race. Hell our founders did it with religion. But people with little lives have to fight that because that means they are no different than everyone else and that is unacceptable to them, that humans are the same and that they can’t lord their miserable little lives over others.
Ruckus
@burnspbesq:
Oh I know this. I’ve lived it. For 70 yrs. Having been on the poorer side of middle class all my life. Having ended up in my senior years, still having to work at that 70, because of it. Every time I tried to work my way out of it, and I have because that’s what I know, the world says fuck you. I lost a going business in the 94 earthquake. No one’s fault there, just the way it happened. Others lost their lives. My best friend and his wife lost their home, burned to the ground. But I lost my second small business to republican financial bullshit. The “not so great” recession just over a decade ago. Many lost far more. None needed to lose any. And the system rewarded those that took advantage of republican fuckery with basically walking away financially whole. I saw many who were worse off than me, who had less and lost more.
The world will always reward those with excess but it doesn’t have to massively penalize those without.
Betty
As you would know, the existence of dental and vision for some drives up the cost for many of us who don’t have it.
Betsy
Yes and good grief. I have long detested the paperwork, the waste of time, the partial tiny deduction, and the senselessness of these health savings account/FSA arrangements where you only get a small deduction you don’t actually get the price of the medical thing that you bought, you have to spend three hours on keeping receipts, fishing out receipts, photocopying receipts, making files, faxing things, submitting them online, retrieving your loss password, etc. etc.
I think the rationale Behind all this can be chalked up to American Calvinism: we’ll give you some thing, a scanty little something, but first and only if you have to suffer for it a little.
With a dose of “working peon, your time is worth nothing.”
No Swiss would put up with this.
Americans. Why do we hate ourselves?
Ruckus
@Betsy:
It isn’t that we all hate ourselves, many just hate everyone else. Of course there are many who should hate themselves, such as our president. But that’s another story……
Brachiator
@Betsy:
Don’t the Swiss have compulsory health insurance? I don’t know how it is administered.
Leumas
I am a CPA, and prepare tax returns for a living. If it were up to me, tax rates would be far more progressive. However, one of the anomalies of a progressive tax code is that a deduction is worth more to you if you are in a higher tax bracket. You are correct: most of this stuff should not be done with tax deductions IMHO. But until the glorious day when that happens, that is what we deal with.
SteveNKY
the building of a permanent underclass continues.
a few years ago the dentist said the boy will need orthodontics after all the baby teeth come out. at that time, i didn’t shovel the maximum amount into a HSA. i simple divided the maximum deductible by 26 pay periods to put money aside. after dentist visit, i change to maximum amount allowed. and, if like others, my company provides a contribution to the HSA too.
the last baby tooth came out several weeks ago. the boy needs braces. he has my teeth. his appointment is still a couple weeks out. BUT. when the several thousand dollar bill comes for a spacer then braces, i have many thousands of dollars in a HSA to simply pay the bill. 100% non-taxed and a goodly chunk provided by my employers (past and present).
the HSA has saved us a couple of times with the yearly changes in drug covered for his asthma medicine. however, living in KY, the “nice” flat tax from crooked former gov bevin and floating between the 24% – 32% fed tax rate; risk sharing for the top 20% and free clinics at strip malls for the rest is acceptable by 40% of the country.