The eye care medical field has an unusual split between two different types of insurance for covering eye issues: health insurance and vision insurance. Not all patients have both.

In most cases, your health insurance is used to cover medical and surgical eye problems but not routine exams or the cost of contacts or glasses. Those things are often covered by separate vision insurance.

Why the difference? Originally, health insurance was created to take care of health “problems” and wasn’t designed to cover “routine,” “screening,” or “wellness” exams.

Since health insurance wasn’t going to cover “routine” eye exams, the vision insurance industry arose to help insure/cover those routine exams as well as the costs of glasses and/or contacts if they were needed.

That dichotomy now often causes great confusion when you make an appointment at your eye doctor. When making your appointment, the office is going to need to know which insurance, if you have both, you are going to...

What does blood in the back of the eye signify, anyway?

It could be a retinal vein occlusion, an ocular disorder that can occur in older people where the blood vessels to the retina are blocked.

The retina is the back part of the eye where light focuses and transmits images to the brain. Blockage of the veins in the retina can cause sudden vision loss. The severity of vision loss depends on where the blockage is located.

Blockage at smaller branches in the retinal vein is referred to as branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO).  Vision loss in BRVO is usually less severe, and sometimes just parts of the vision is blurry.  Blockage at the main retinal vein of the eye is referred to as central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) and results in more serious vision loss. 

Sometimes blockage of the retinal veins can lead to abnormal new blood vessels developing on the surface of the iris (the colored part of your eye) or the retina. This is a late complication of retinal vein blockage...