An Eye for An Eye - How Mira Turns The Table on Vision Benefits

4 Big Problems with Vision Benefits Today. 

Americans today devote as much time looking at a screen as they do sleeping (if you’re lucky to have a 7-hour nightly sleep). With the rise of screen usage and associated health issues, the vision care market is forecasted to double in size to reach a whopping $170B by 2032. While 2 in 3 need some form of vision correction, only half have access to vision benefits. And even when insured, many failed to reap significant value from existing plans, largely due to 4 reasons that we discovered:

1. Opaque mark-ups: As part of the product development process at Mira, our own market study found that prices of prescription glasses are being marked up between 800% and 1000%, and as high as 2000% in the luxury segment. This means consumers are spending over $200 for a pair of glasses that costs as little as $20 wholesale.

2. Convoluted benefits design: Vision insurance carriers rely heavily on this opaque markup phenomenon to attract members and employers. They artificially inflate retail prices many times over and then provide steep discounts or member rates to increase value perception—a widespread tactic called "high-low pricing."

3. La La land pricing: We also observed that carriers and brokers have very little standardization in quoting premiums, often quoting as much as employers are willing to pay, ranging from $100 to $200-$300 annually per employee for the same plan. These figures added up to cost employers a total of $4.2 billion in 2021, a significant expense considering the state of the economy.

4. Misconstrued coverage: Lastly, vision insurance today does not cover as much as people think. While labeled insurance, vision benefits work more like a discount plan but often come with hidden costs. For example, eye care like treatments for injuries, infections, and diseases, are considered medical and therefore not covered. 

"The launch of MiraVision strikes at the heart of our ethos. We are serving an increasingly popular demographic—the bulk of middle-income Americans who are more interested in practical-premium solutions rather than