DRAPER, Utah—1-800 Contacts notified the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) yesterday of alleged violations by “nearly 28,000 optometrists and other eyecare providers of the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act of 2004 (FCLCA).” The Act requires ECPs to provide patients with a copy of their contact lens prescription.

According to 1-800 Contacts, “These violations reveal a pattern of improper and illegal behavior by many optometrists who consistently put their own profits ahead of patient choice.”

Steven A. Loomis, OD, president of the American Optometric Association responded by saying, “This is another frivolous and unsupported attack on doctors, patients and quality eyecare by an out-of-control industry. Their self-serving, home-cooked “research” has been rejected in state after state and in Washington, DC. These attacks on the doctor-patient relationship and well -established laws recognizing contact lenses as a medical device are backfiring, making them even less credible and placing them further on the fringe.

“As state optometric associations keep defeating their anti-patient bills, the AOA will continue making it a high priority to hold unscrupulous internet contact lens sellers accountable with Federal agencies and with the media whenever and wherever their greed places health and vision at risk,” Loomis said.

“Unlike medical doctors who do not sell what they prescribe, optometrists sell the contact lenses they prescribe,” said Cindy Williams, general counsel of 1-800 Contacts.

“This conflict of interest results in some optometrists acting in a manner that limits their patients’ ability to buy lenses from other retailers—and often results in consumers paying higher prices for an identical product. The violations submitted by 1-800 Contacts to the FTC demonstrate how these optometrists unfairly compete and may harm patient safety as needed prescriptions are not released,” she said.

In response to a query from VMail about how they determined the number of ECPs who violated the FCLCA, 1-800 Contacts' Williams said, “Keeping robust and accurate records is a priority for 1-800 Contacts, and it is the normal course of our business and our compliance with the FCLCA to keep this kind of data.

"Over the course of the last four months we have combed this data, to underscore the widespread pattern of violations by optometrists who are choosing profits over their patients. The vast majority of the violations were discovered in instances when 1-800-Contacts was granted the right to act as its customer’s agent to obtain a copy of their prescription from their doctor. The violations occurred when the optometrists failed to respond to the request, which is contrary to the obligations mandated in the FCLCA,” she said.