A few dollars a month, and the eye exam catches things that are not about eyes.
Group vision plans covering exams, frames, lenses and contacts — inexpensive enough that most employers add it without a business case, and useful enough that the exam is worth the premium alone.
Tell us the situation.
A licensed human replies the same business day — not an auto-responder, and not five producers calling at once. We shop it across our carriers and tell you if the policy you already have is the right one.
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What group vision insurance businesses actually need.
Annual eye exam
A covered exam, typically with a small copay.
Without it — A routine exam detects diabetes, hypertension and glaucoma early, and it is the part people skip.
Frames and lenses
An allowance toward frames, and covered lenses on a set schedule.
Without it — Glasses are bought out of pocket at full retail.
Contact lens allowance
An alternative to the frame benefit, usually one or the other in a year.
Without it — Contact wearers get no value from a frames-only plan.
What group vision insurance operators ask us.
What does a vision plan cost?
Typically $5 to $12 per employee per month, which makes it the least expensive line on a benefits sheet by a wide margin. At that price most employers either pay it entirely or offer it voluntarily at a group rate the employee could not get individually. The two networks that matter are VSP and EyeMed; check which one your employees’ existing optometrists take before choosing, because the network is essentially the whole product.
Is it worth it when glasses are cheap online?
For the glasses alone, sometimes not — online retailers have made basic frames and lenses genuinely inexpensive. The exam is the part that justifies it: a dilated eye exam is one of the few routine screenings that sees blood vessels and the optic nerve directly, and it regularly picks up diabetes, hypertension and glaucoma before anything else does. An employer offering the plan is mostly buying the fact that employees actually go.