S.C. Supreme Court hears challenge to law banning online eye exams

COLUMBIA, S.C. (WRDW/WAGT) - Technology that has been in existence for years can save hundreds of millions of Americans from a trip to the eye doctor’s office when they need prescription glasses or lenses.

Health data shows that around two-thirds of all people in the United States wear some type of corrective prescription lens.

But that technology is banned in South Carolina, despite having approval from the FDA and being allowed in nearly three dozen other states.

A nearly-decade-old state law prevents people in South Carolina from taking an eye exam online to receive a prescription for lenses or glasses.

One of the companies that isters these online exams is challenging this law, and it was heard before South Carolina’s Supreme Court on Tuesday in Columbia.

“South Carolina treats lenses differently than everything else doctors can prescribe online, from eye drops to skin creams to antibiotics,” said Joshua Windham, senior attorney for Institute for Justice, which is representing the company Opternative.

Windham said there is no rational reason for that different treatment, making the 2016 law unconstitutional.

Opternative is one of a number of companies that offer an online eye exam similar to how people are tested at the eye doctor’s office, but there is no doctor or assistant on the other side, istering the exam.

After that test, an actual person reviews the results and writes a prescription for lenses that customers can order online.

A lower court previously ruled in favor of upholding the law.

Attorneys for the South Carolina Optometric Physicians Association (SCOPA) want to keep the law in place, itting they have an economic incentive to it, so more patients visit their offices, but arguing it also ensures safe and adequate eye care.

“An interaction with a medical professional in a setting, in an in-person setting, allows for the discovery of other very prevalent health problems, like diabetes, like glaucoma, like hypertension,” Kirby Shealy, an attorney representing SCOPA, said.

Windham responded that argument could be made for most other types of telemedicine, which a separate state law generally permits, with some exceptions, including prescriptions for opioids, abortion drugs, and, of course, lenses.

“SCOPA’s argument in this case requires the court to pretend that glasses are more like opioids and abortions than skin creams and eye drops, and I don’t think this court has to pretend, under the South Carolina constitution,” Windham said.

Some justices seemed skeptical of what they described as a carveout in state law for lens prescriptions.

Chief Justice John Kittredge compared it to the availability of reading glasses at drugstores, which do not require a prescription.

“I see an eye chart, I see which one works better, and I make a choice,” he said. “Why isn’t that illegal? Do I sue Walgreens and Eckerds and CVS?”

There is no timeline for the Supreme Court to rule following Tuesday’s arguments.

The law itself was initially vetoed in 2016 by then-Gov. Nikki Haley, who said it put South Carolina “on the leading edge of protectionism, not innovation,” and sent the wrong message to the business community.

But the General Assembly overwhelmingly overrode Haley’s veto to enact the legislation.

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