KevinMD July 11, 2025
Brick-and-mortar stores must deal with online competition. Even health clinics face disruption from telemedicine. Yet optometrists have special protection in South Carolina.
When a telehealth company invented a safe and effective way for doctors to renew vision prescriptions remotely, political insiders rallied in Columbia to ban the service in South Carolina. Now, nine years later, the state-sponsored favoritism could end.
The South Carolina Supreme Court, which already rejected an attempt to dismiss the case in 2022, will finally decide whether the protectionist ban is unconstitutional.
Oral arguments—available online like just about everything else in the modern economy—occurred on June 3, 2025. The case started much earlier in 2016, when established providers got fed up with Chicago-based Visibly operating in their...
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