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Eye exam
I'm getting an eye exam today at 4. If I go through our official vision benefit provider (a company called Davis Vision) I can get an eye exam and a new pair of eyeglasses each year if I want. It's been a while since I bothered to have my prescription checked and besides, why not make use of a benefit that vanishes if it's not used by the end of each year? The participating optician I'll be seeing is, interestingly enough, the Sears Optical department at our local Sears. Carole wound up going there for her most recent set of contacts and seemed happy enough with them.
I was actually pretty annoyed when we were switched to Davis Vision because we used to be able to go pretty much anywhere to any eye doctor or any optician and get covered. After we were taken over by our new corporate overlords and switched to their benefit package, we could only get full coverage if we went to a vendor who was part of the Davis Vision network... and hardly any providers in the local area were. And the one we'd been seeing for years wasn't and the network wasn't looking for new members, either. Even though I mainly wear eyeglasses because of astigmatism and often don't wear them if I don't need to read text, it annoyed me at a philosophical level that people were being forced to drop relationships with providers they'd been seeing for twenty years and had to pick one of about five local eye doctors if they needed vision care. As I saw it, if you're going to give fairly minimal coverage to services provided by out-of-network eye doctors, for the love of Jeebus at least try to have a decent number of in-network providers in the area to choose from.
Blame that in part on my living in Vermont. Davis Vision seems to have more participating providers in larger metropolitan areas.
In any case, it turns out that Sears Optical is part of their network so I figured, "hey, they're not far from work or from Carole's office, I can run by there after work and get an exam and maybe pick out a new pair of frames." Perhaps they'll have something tasteful, maybe in pink. :)
I was actually pretty annoyed when we were switched to Davis Vision because we used to be able to go pretty much anywhere to any eye doctor or any optician and get covered. After we were taken over by our new corporate overlords and switched to their benefit package, we could only get full coverage if we went to a vendor who was part of the Davis Vision network... and hardly any providers in the local area were. And the one we'd been seeing for years wasn't and the network wasn't looking for new members, either. Even though I mainly wear eyeglasses because of astigmatism and often don't wear them if I don't need to read text, it annoyed me at a philosophical level that people were being forced to drop relationships with providers they'd been seeing for twenty years and had to pick one of about five local eye doctors if they needed vision care. As I saw it, if you're going to give fairly minimal coverage to services provided by out-of-network eye doctors, for the love of Jeebus at least try to have a decent number of in-network providers in the area to choose from.
Blame that in part on my living in Vermont. Davis Vision seems to have more participating providers in larger metropolitan areas.
In any case, it turns out that Sears Optical is part of their network so I figured, "hey, they're not far from work or from Carole's office, I can run by there after work and get an exam and maybe pick out a new pair of frames." Perhaps they'll have something tasteful, maybe in pink. :)