A 5-minute read on what a skipped eye exam actually costs, in money and in warnings nobody else happened to be watching for.
An annual eye exam runs about ten or fifteen minutes and a copay most insurance already covers. A full credit report review runs about the same, a few minutes scrolling a statement line by line. Neither feels like it is checking for much. Both are built to catch the kind of problem that does its damage quietly, long before it announces itself.
Glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy are the textbook cases for why the eye exam matters: both progress with no symptoms at all until the vision they have already taken is gone for good. The exam is not treating anything, it is finding the one year early treatment still changes the outcome, instead of the year three or four years later when a patient notices the damage on their own and a far more expensive, far less reversible version of the same problem shows up instead.
A statement scanned line by line does the same job for money. A subscription that quietly renewed at a higher price, a small charge from somewhere unfamiliar, a fee that crept in last quarter and has been collecting ever since, all of it is cheap to catch in month one and expensive to catch in month twelve, once it has had a year to repeat itself unnoticed.
Neither check is really measuring the thing it looks like it is measuring. The eye exam is not really about eyesight in the moment, it is about which window a treatable problem still falls inside. The statement review is not really about this month’s charges, it is about whether the account still matches what someone agreed to pay. Both are only worth something in the rare year they catch a problem, and both look like a waste of fifteen minutes every single year they do not.
That is also exactly why both get skipped. A check that pays off once every several years, if ever, is easy to treat as optional right up until the year it was not, at which point the bill, medical or financial, is for considerably more than the exam or the ten minutes would have cost.
P.S. Tomorrow: why “I pay off the card every month” changes spending faster than a credit score target does, and the same swap for calling yourself a sleeper instead of chasing eight hours.
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