Consumer Reports Blasts CL Pricing Policies -- Again!!!

"Today the manufacturers that account for about 98 percent of all contacts sold in the U.S. are setting minimum retail prices. Who benefits from denying discounts to price-conscious consumers? High-price retailers, including eye doctors who sell contact lenses directly to their patients. And the eye doctors determine which contact lenses to prescribe for each patient. So each manufacturer wants to stay on the doctors’ 'good list.'" That's represents one of many shots across the bows of the major contact lens manufacturers by Consumer Reports. "Without this warped incentive, contact lens manufacturers would likely welcome retail discounting, because more consumers could afford to buy contacts. Manufacturers would still set the wholesale price, so each retail sale, at any price, would provide the same benefit for the manufacturer. That’s how a healthy competitive market should work. Consumers Union fought this battle more than a decade ago. It used to be that eye doctors wouldn’t even give patients the contact lens prescription, making it exceedingly difficult to get contacts anywhere else but at the doctor’s—and at the price the doctor charged. That finally changed in 2003, when Congress passed the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act, requiring eye doctors to hand over that prescription." Read more.