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Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote: I recently had my yearly glasses update. Cost was $188 to me + $20 of insurance copay, so the glasses provider charged $208 for the glasses.

That's not too bad, so I asked how much it would be to replace/update the lenses on my old frames, entirely at my charge.

It would've been $450. Just for the lenses.

I passed. I find it scandalous how much they can charge when just before they were perfectly happy to accept less than half that amount.

Instead I got another pair on EyeBuyDirect for $80.

It's not just the insurers themselves, but the whole system. Burn it all down.

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You might not realize it, but often the insurance company, and the glasses company are the same company.

The whole thing is a scam - pay insurance premium, to lower the cost of glasses (the copay) back to what it should be in the first place.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica "the world's largest company in the eyewear industry" "It also owns EyeMed, one of the largest vision health insurance providers."

I've been buying glasses from the cheap Chinese websites for ages now. There's some utility to being able to take your time in a show room, but the online venders are so cheap it only took one or two tries for me to find frames I like reliably. And they're $60 instead of $600 even with some premium coatings/features.

> It's not just the insurers themselves, but the whole system. Burn it all down.

Painstakingly, methodically, improve it, taking care at each step that you're making it better. :)

This is exactly how to corner yourself into a local optimum that balances how much people are pissed off, rather than how much people see benefits.

The chaos of "nothing" is very destructive. That realization is at core of why Im a conservative.

I'm not sure I agree. If it did happen, that's another problem to be fixed.

I do know that the way to design complicated, successful systems is to start with simple, successful systems and build on them: starting to design a complicated system from scratch seems like a recipe for much bigger problems, and that's what you'd have to do after "burning it all down". That's even assuming that "build something new" was the second step implied after "burn it all down", though you'll note that was not stated in the original comment.

I think we can agree that "burn it all down, and that's it" is the worst possible solution.

> If it did happen, that's another problem to be fixed.

Adding problems disguised as solutions is exactly the issue I'm speaking to. You don't actually satisfy needs in this model, you just end up chastising your subjects with "look at what we've already given you, shut up and take it because there are others who need help too". This incites division and factionalism because you've constructed a market which forces people to compete against each other for charity.

Charity is injustice, as Chris Hedges says, because charity demands a cost from the recipient. Beyond this competition, we also can be confident acknowledging that charity develops dependence, which is again the opposite of sustainable self-determinism.

https://www.lensabl.com/

The reviewer at wirecutter sent them some cheap foldable reading glasses to put prescription lenses in, and ended up with a pretty unique pair of glasses.

They likely had lenses already available for the frames they had in stock, or were frequently making batches of them.

OTOH the frames you already owned may be out of style, so they would have needed to grind a totally custom pair of lenses, just for you.

Nah. Outside of the vision cartel you can get replacement lenses for any pair of frames < $100, with all the various coatings and special shit for low hundreds. Likewise, using insurance to just replace the lenses, if a plan includes that, is often $50 or less. It's just shopping at the vision cartel without insurance = huge sticker price.

Any tips for how to stay "outside the vision cartel"? (In the US, if that is relevant...)

zenni optical. I mostly use contacts, but I have several 'backup' glasses. You can get decent looks frame for like $11 shipped.

Yeah; that won't work for replacing lenses in existing frames, but for a new pair it's what I do. $50-60 and I've got my prescription in a frame I like with all the coatings.

This doesn't work as an explanation, lenses are always cut to the frame.

My brother in law owned a lens cutting shop and they have boxes filled with lenses ground to all sorts of prescriptions that are circular plugs 3 or 4 inches in diameter. When the order comes in they use the pupil measurements and the frames to cut the lenses for the prescription down to fit into the frame.

I don't know how well I explained that but you can watch this video to see exactly how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCjGNUPO0WU

Thanks for this explanation - makes complete sense but never thought about it!

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