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My kiddo was so lucky! Her eyes held out until second grade before needing assistance in seeing. I myself had to get glasses in first grade. She suddenly was struggling to read the board at school and the teacher moved her to the front row. So off we went to the eye doctor.
Luckily, our health insurance includes vision coverage for dependents, so we didn’t have to have separate vision insurance for the appointment or for the glasses-or so I thought. We had a slight hiccup in the insurance process when we looked at frames.
My daughter needed her first pair of glasses and she was so excited about the frames she picked out!
She tried on quite a few pairs, and we had a good old time taking pictures of each one. When she found her favorite pair, it was love at first site. They were black with pretty blue and green flowers down the sides. And she had to have them. I loved them as well and was excited that she was so excited to be getting her first pair of glasses.
Then came the dreaded news that our insurance didn’t cover those particular frames and it would cost more than $400 to get them.
This came as a shock to me because I went into the appointment believing that my insurance included 100% coverage for glasses for my daughter. But we’d been looking at frames in the wrong section of the store.
When the assistant led us over to the frames that our insurance would cover, there was literally no consoling my kiddo. Her crocodile tears could not be stopped. To her, it was the worst thing that could happen. She didn’t want to have to wear glasses anymore. The off-limits pair was the first time she’d been excited to wear them, and it was taken away. She decided that she hated all the options that our insurance would cover because there were none exactly like the ones she wanted.
Well, we didn’t give up, but we did leave to try anew another day. The next week, we went to another location and, low and behold, we found a pair covered by our insurance that looked nearly identical to the ones she originally wanted (without the blue and green flowers), and she was excited too! Thank goodness!
When all was said and done, we only paid $85 out of pocket (and that was for the anti-scratch coating).
In the side-by-side below, you can see the $400 option on the left, and the $85 option on the right.
Total Savings: $315
Insurance and fashion are crazy things.
I did some brainstorming and came up with a solution for the missing flowers on her frames– see my post on how we decorated them and gave them serious personality for less than $1: Add personality to plain eyeglasses for less than a dollar. This solution was also non-permanent so she can change it up as often as she wants.
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