Total Cost of Ownership for Your LASIK Surgery

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is the idea that the cost of something it the sum of its initial price plus the cost of maintaining the thing in working order over its lifetime. Here, we apply the idea of TCO to LASIK surgery. TCO can be defined for your LASIK procedure as:

TCO of LASIK Vision Correction =
Primary surgery fee
+
Secondary surgery fee(s)

Most patients think only of the primary fee for LASIK surgery and not the potential addition of secondary procedures or checkups to correct any residual prescription after the primary procedure.

TCO Scenarios for your LASIK Surgery

It may be that you decide to have Wavefront LASIK on both of your eyes. Your surgeon performs the procedure, which costs $4600. After a couple of weeks, you notice that your left eye sees much better than your right eye. You return to your San Francisco eye surgeon who explains that they over-corrected your right eye during your primary LASIK surgery.

Because of the over-correction, your surgeon says that you will have to undergo a secondary procedure, often called an enhancement or re-treatment, to fix the problem. Like many other LASIK practices, they charge you to re-treat the right eye, in this case, another $200. Now, you’ve paid the laser eye surgery practice $4800, and you might find that you will need additional secondary treatments.

A Second LASIK Re-Treatment Required?

A week later, you are back in your surgeon’s San Francisco office because you are experiencing blurring in your right eye. Your surgeon might not reveal what the problem is, but will fix it for another $200. Since you don’t have a choice, you pay another $200 to your LASIK doctor, bringing the total for this laser vision correction surgeon to $5000.

Unfortunately, this can go on back and forth and never reach a resolution where both you and your doctor are happy. You may have to seek treatment from another LASIK surgeon in San Francisco, who may charge even more money.