If you are accustomed to the major brand names of contact lenses such as Acuvue, Bausch and Lomb, and Ciba, you may be surprised to receive a prescription for a brand that you have never heard of before. However, with patients having more options about where to buy their contact lenses than ever before, more doctors are turning to private label contact lenses.
The advantage for doctors is clear – it is much more difficult to find alternate sources to buy a private label brand than a mass market brand like Acuvue. This means that more patients will buy directly from the doctor’s office, increasing the doctor’s profit margins.
However, as a patient you should be wary of such practices. Many private label brands are unable to compete with larger companies when it comes to technology advances. New materials that improve contact lens comfort and health are likely to be unavailable with private label brands.
Furthermore, many contact lens cleaning solutions are designed to work with specific brands. If you have a private label brand, you might have difficulty finding a compatible solution at a reasonable price. This coupled with the fact that the lack of competition makes most private label brands more expensive means that you could be paying significantly more for an off-brand prescription.
So what do you do if your eye doctor prescribes a brand that you’ve never heard of?
First, ask your eye doctor for an explanation. Why did he or she choose that particular brand? Is there a technological or financial reason for prescribing a private label lens? What advantages does his choice have for you?
Secondly, look at your prescription to see if any alternative brands are listed. Although government regulations demand that contact lens prescriptions are filled with the brand that the doctor specifies, there is an exception. Contacts made by mass market companies like Acuvue and sold under different names for private label branding can be substituted for the name brand. That means that you might still be able to shop around for a better price.
If your eye doctor is not able to give you a good reason for accepting an off-name brand, and you are not able to substitute lenses, ask him or her to change your prescription to a more common type of lens.
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