April 22, 2019

President Donald J. Trump

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear President Trump,

America’s doctors of optometry are proud to serve the vision and eye health needs of
millions of Americans. We are equally proud to be small business owners, who make up
the lifeblood of our nation’s economy.

We greatly appreciate your administration’s prioritization of addressing regulatory

burden. Like you, we are profoundly troubled by unnecessary red tape being put in place
by unelected bureaucrats. As you have rightly noted, too often these bureaucrats impose
anti-business regulations with no vote, no legislative debate, and no real accountability.

Currently, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering an Obama-era proposed

regulation that could add unnecessary costs to tens of thousands of eye doctor practices
across the country while raising prices on millions of consumers and jeopardizing job
growth in thousands of communities.

Enacted in 2004, the Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act (FCLCA) carefully
balanced competition in the sale of contact lenses and protection of the contact lens
wearing public. With implementation entrusted to the FTC, the FCLCA ensured contact
lens prescription portability to further empower consumers to purchase contact lenses
from their retailer of choice, allowing competition to flourish.

But in late 2016, under a lame duck session of Congress, the previous administration
issued a proposed change to the Contact Lens Rule under the FCLCA, mandating that
each of the 50,000-plus eye doctors in the United States ask each of the 45 million-plus
contact lens-wearing Americans to sign a document indicating the patient received a
copy of their prescription. The doctor would then be required to retain this document
for several years and be able to produce these forms in the event of a federal
investigation.

This unnecessary record-keeping burden, if implemented, will mean 50,000 health care
practitioners, many of whom are small business owners, will have to add new
procedures to their offices, train staff members to adhere to this new regulation, and
waste precious patient time that could be better spent on improving health care. The
FTC estimates that the new requirement would cost the industry roughly $10.5 million
annually and an independent economic analysis estimates that, if finalized, compliance
with this rule could cost $18,000 per doctor, per year.

The proposed rule ignores the FTC’s own data showing that the Commission received a
total of 309 complaints regarding the Contact Lens Rule out of an estimated 200 million
prescriptions issued between 2011 and 2016. Importantly, over half of the complaints
FTC received were completely unrelated to prescriber compliance. Additionally, the
proposed rule ignores the important reality that in our current economic boom,
competition in the contact lens market is more robust than ever before.

This is why we urge the FTC and your Administration to reject this proposed change and
maintain the 2004 Fairness to Contact Lens Consumers Act (FCLCA) and
corresponding rules, which carefully balanced competition in the sale of contact lenses
and protection of patients.

We’ve attached some supporting materials to this letter for your reference. We look
forward to hearing from you or one of your representatives.

Sincerely,

Samuel D. Pierce, O.D.

President
American Optometric Association
1505 Prince Street
Suite 300
Alexandria, VA
President@aoa.org