Mike Linksvayer

Lasik Remains a Luxury Procedure, a new AP story that purports to look back on a decade of laser vision correction:

A lack of health insurance coverage keeps the procedure a luxury item, affordable only to people who can spare $3,000 to $5,000.

The story fails to mention that Lasik prices declined 38 percent from 1998 to 2004.

Perhaps lasik does remain a luxury good, but the lack of price data seems like a serious omission from the story given its headline and retrospective nature. (I looked at the article because I hoped it would mention 1995-2005 price changes–it’s a pain to find data period, and moreso on a subject where most search hits basically point to advertisements.)

I won’t go for corrective vision surgery until the right combination of deterioration of my eyesight and improvement in the expected outcome of such surgery occurs–probably a decade or more from now.

I’d prefer to wait for replacement with intelligently designed (by bio-engineers) eyes with vastly greater capabilies than my current amazing yet severely limited evolved set–better for watching the scenery from my future driverless car.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 11th, 2005 at 13:58 and is filed under Economics, Health, Peeves. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.