How much time and money does it cost to sign a piece of paper?

There are 45 million contact lens wearers in the United States.

How many are affected by optometrists not releasing prescriptions?

The Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act (FCLCA) mandates that optometrists automatically release a copy of a patient's prescription. This is not a new regulation (it has been in effect since 2004) yet optometrists continue to refuse to release prescriptions.

How bad is it? Pretty bad:

In 2019, 49% of contact lens wearers didn't automatically receive their prescription. Worse, 21% of contact lens wearers never received a copy of their prescription at all.

This means millions of Americans have been impacted:

45 million x 49% = 22 million contact lens wearers didn’t automatically receive a copy of their contact lens prescription.

Of those customers, 9.5 million Americans never received a copy of their prescription. The remaining 12.5 million only received their prescription after asking for it.

Concerns about the costs of Signed Acknowledgment are ridiculously overstated.

Maintaining patient records has always been part of the practice of medicine. Optometrists already maintain HIPAA consent forms, health questionnaires, and other information for their patients. All the FTC requires is for one more patient signature to be recorded, stored, and one more brief conversation to be had. It's not a lot to ask when you consider that this requirement wouldn't need to exist if optometrists would comply with the law by automatically releasing prescriptions.

The Boozman Bill claims the estimated cost of Signed Acknowledgment would be $10,000-$18,000 per year, per office.

Estimates provided by the American Optometric Association to the FTC didn't just include the cost of Signed Acknowledgment. Instead, it combined multiple administrative activities in their estimate to artificially inflate the cost. Fortunately, the FTC saw right through their argument.

According to the FTC, actual costs for Signed Acknowledgment will be minimal:

"Based on national wage data, the Commission estimates that the annual cost for optometrists to maintain hard copies of patient signatures acknowledging receipt of their prescriptions would be $159 per prescriber per year."

Source: Chairman Simons Testimony, U.S. Senate Oversight of FTC Hearing, August 5, 2020

Let's check the math:

$159 per year / 261 workdays in the calendar year

$0.61 per day

Yes, optometrists are fighting the FTC over $0.61 per day. $0.61 can't even buy a soda from a vending machine anymore…their objections are much ado about nothing. With electronic health records becoming more common, the price could be even less.

The FTC clearly demonstrated that the cost of $159 per prescriber, per year, is a justifiable cost in order to ensure higher compliance with prescription release.

If optometrists would release prescriptions to patients as required by law, the number of verification calls from contact lens sellers to these optometrists should fall.

Not having to handle these verification requests would save them time and money, offsetting the already minimal costs of getting the Signed Acknowledgement.

Signed Acknowledgment provides the FTC with the ability to enforce prescription release, which otherwise will continue to be virtually impossible. The FTC must be able to protect contact lens wearer's rights.