patrick.net

"A smartphone app is as effective at testing eyesight as an optician's clinic, a trial suggests."

I have commented elsewhere that you can get a complete pair of generic glasses for $20 from Zenni Optical. There are free pupilometers online, or you can take a selfie holding a ruler over your eyes and measure the PD yourself.

If you prefer to buy brand names, the Luxxotica quasi-monopoly (including LensCrafters, Pearle, and more) makes high quality at high prices, but you have a choice. You can choose to pay for the brand name and retail hand-holding, or you can DIY and save 90%.

Bausch&Lomb wanted to sell its disposable contact lenses OTC, but opticians threatened to boycott and lobbied hard to protect their Rx revenue stream, so federal law prohibits you from buying without an Rx. If past practice is any indication, they will try to do the same to prevent you from buying eyeglasses, or to make you prepay for mandatory subsidized vision insurance.

These industries use your government as their tool: your "representatives" work for them, not you. Then, when they've maximized their revenue by raising the price beyond what people can afford, they offer a magic "subsidy" for their corporate sponsors, which they misrepresent as a subsidy to you. Obamneycare is the biggest and most obvious example: its purpose and effect are to make you prepay the highest retail prices in the world for everything it touches. (But don't worry if you can't afford that artificially inflated price, subsidies will shift it onto your neighbors and their kids.) Life doesn't have to be this way: people don't need to be captured constituencies, hopelessly dependent on their captors for "subsidies" to pay the artificial markups that their captors created. Most of American medical spending goes to waste, fraud, and abuse, including absurd markups that would not be possible without the Byzantine obfuscatory cost-shifting of mandatory subsidized insurance.