Cohen Fashion Optical (177 East 86th St.)

Don't go there. A sales girl named Sylvia lied about my vision benefits from Blue Vision after calling to check and did so to make more money. I caked Blue Vision to verify what I know to be my benefits and she refused to talk to them on my cell phone and said Blue Vision should call the store. When the phone rang they refused to answer and the store owner came out to say they don't like paperwork and anyway he couldn't verify my membership in Blue Vision. They are in the Blue Vision network which why I went there at great difficulty because it is hard for me to walk. Not only do they lie to charge more but I believe their lie borders on fraud.

I want to preface this by saying I'm not a person who ever complains about businesses, or in general, but I feel compelled to write a complaint about this particular Cohen's Fashion Optical. I found the staff to be consistently rude, dismissive, and unprofessional, which makes me feel like it's something that is endemic to the management and training at that particular location, and not me dealing with just some unprofessional individuals.

I use Affordable Healthcare Insurance, and am under the [redacted] plan, that uses [redacted] for eye care. Under my plan I get up to $100 of contacts or glasses covered a year if my deductible is met (it is not, but I understood that). I called [redacted] and asked them where I should go to get contacts. They recommended I go to the Cohen's Fashion Optical on [redacted] I've since warned [redacted] not to send people there. I visited this Cohen's three times and each time the staff was unbelievably rude to me and didn't bother to try to understand my health insurance.

The first time I went there I worked with a staff member named Rita. She immediately turned me away because she said that she couldn't find my ID number in the [redacted] database. After calling [redacted] myself on my cell phone I confirmed that I was in their system, Rita just wasn't typing it in correctly. [redacted] was even kind enough to fax all my info over to the store so that they'd see me. After that Rita brought me to see a doctor for an eye exam and contacts fitting. They offered to order me some sample contacts and told me they'd call me when they arrived. They sent me home with a sample pair at the visit to try out. At the end of the visit Rita told me my total for everything with my insurance would be $60. I paid it and left.

I hadn't hear from Cohen's for a few weeks and decided I wanted to just order the contacts I had tried on instead of waiting, so went back to order some. I was dealing with a different employee whose name I didn't catch. She told me that my plan didn't cover my contacts until I had met my deductible (which I knew). She tried to have me buy Acuve Daily Moist Contacts for [redacted] for well above market rate (I later checked on the Internet and saw that they're normally around $80 for 90 days of contacts, she was trying to sell them for $80 for 30 days, so around $480 for 6 months, instead of $160 for 6 months, or $320 for a year). I said no and left. After some thought I decided that I should take my business elsewhere, since I got the sense that this store didn't understand my insurance, didn't care to, and was going to end up costing me more money than I had to spend. I was unfortunately completely right.

I came back about a week later after talking with [redacted] again. They told me that for a routine eye exam I should only pay $35, and that Cohen's had not only overcharged me, but Davis could not find any record of my insurance having been used there, so Rita had overcharged me without using my insurance, and none of it would go to my deductible. The woman I was speaking with from [redacted] recommended I go to a [redacted] center in the Bronx where they are used to dealing with my type of insurance. All I need to do was go back and get my prescription from Cohen's and I could take my business elsewhere.

I went back to this Cohen's location on the [redacted]. I was working with an employee named Taliah. She was by far the most rude and abrasive person at this location. I went up to her and asked if I could get a copy of prescription on a piece of paper. It took her at least ten minutes to find it, their system was clearly not very organized. Once she found my record she found a stack of sample contacts that had come in. She berated me for not picking them up, even though I explained I had been told I had been instructed to wait for a phone call, and had been there the week before and no one had said anything about my sample contacts while I was there. Taliah then told me that I owed Cohen's $100 because a contact fitting was a separate charge than an eye test, and the total was $160. I explained to her that no one had told me that when I took the test or did the fitting, or when I had been back the week before. If I had know it would be that much I would have refused to be seen there, since that is more money than I really had to spend on the eye doctor/contact fitting. Taliah told me that this was because Rita, who had charged me the $60 earlier was a new employee and didn't know all the rules. Taliah wanted me to pay $100 for a service charge I hadn't consented to because one of their employees had messed up, didn't bother to learn or understand my insurance, or answer my question correctly when I asked how much the service would cost. I was understandably annoyed. I had just come in to get my prescription and suddenly I was getting charged a huge fee that had never been explained to me, and was expected to just accept it since her coworker had messed up. I asked to speak with [redacted] to learn what my rights were with this. Taliah called [redacted] on the Cohen's land line and handed the phone over to me. All the while Taliah complained to me about Affordable Healthcare insurance and told me to my face that she thought they were annoying and she wished Cohen's didn't accept them since they were hard to deal with. I calmly explained that it was the only way I, and a lot of people in NYC could afford health insurance. We got on the line with a representative from [redacted]. When I was trying to discuss my concerns with the [redacted] employee and pull up my records, Taliah kept interrupting me while I was mid-conversation with the [redacted] employee to try to object to what I was saying, and essential bully me into just accepting the fee. As you can imagine it is hard to listen and talk to one person on the phone while another person next to you keeps interjecting and interrupting with unhelpful information. I asked Taliah to stop. She didn't. Taliah then began rolling her eyes at me, and complaining to me to the other staff members. After a lot of back and forth between me, Taliah, and the [redacted] employee, it became apparent that I wouldn't have to pay the fee if I continued business with Cohen's, but if I wanted to leave with the prescription I would need to pay the $100. Taliah had kept moving the prescription away from me, so to make sure she didn't move it away again, I moved it closer to me on the table. Taliah immediately got angry, grabbed the prescription out of my hands, and yanked the phone away from my head while I was talking to the [redacted] employee. She yelled at me and told me to act like 'an adult'. (Apparently being an adult means accepting random fees that stores tack on to services you already paid for). At this point I was in tears. I asked Taliah what I needed to do to get my prescription and get out of there. She said the only way was to pay the $100. Being fed up with this whole situation and feeling incredibly bullied by this employee, I did. Taliah handed me a piece of paper that had the prescription from the test contacts on it (information I had at home). Since I recognized and knew my actual prescription was different I asked her for the one from the eye test. Taliah said they didn't have that one, despite the fact I had taken and paid for an eye exam. So either she tricked me to get me to pay the $100 without handing over my prescription, or Cohen's never took a record of my actual prescription despite giving me an eye test. I really don't know which one is worse.

So in short: the staff is rude, they don't bother to understand or explain their policy on low income insurance despite accepting it at their store, they charged me without using my insurance and without telling me they were going to do that, and they held me responsible for a fee they never explained to me, and at the end of the day they didn't actually give me the thing that I had paid for. I've worked with other eye doctors in the past ([redacted]) and they always send along your prescription information when you ask for it, no fees, no bullying, and no questions asked.

Ideally I would like to get reimbursed, since I was charged for a fee I didn't agree to, it was charged outside of my insurance without my permission, and was ultimately tricked or Cohen's lost my records, (I'm not sure which) but I know that that might not be possible since at the end of the day I did pay the fee. Either way I would strongly recommend that this Cohen's give their employees sensitivity training, better educate them on the insurances they accept, or let the employees know that they might have to do some work to figure out how customer's health insurance plans work. Otherwise I would strongly recommend that [redacted] stop working with this particular store, or stop letting them accept anyone on [redacted] plans if they can't be bothered to understand them or work with customers who have them.

What made me the most upset about these experiences wasn't the money, it was the lack of transparency with me as a customer and the rudeness toward me as a customer. I'm 25, and I've had my own health insurance for about two years. Once through work, and once through healthfirst. I consider myself to be a responsible person who does their homework, and I understand that there's always a certain amount of back and forth when negotiating a service with a doctor's office and your insurance provider. But never before has anyone charged me a fee without explaining to me how much I'd be paying and what for, or gone back on their word after the fact. And yes, I understand that poor young people at your store equals less money in the short term, but I won't be young and poor forever. However I will always need to buy contacts and glasses. To Cohen's Optical it was more important to bully me into forking over $100 then working with me and retaining me as a customer in the long term. Besides that, my entire reason for trying to stop working with them was their rudeness. If Rita had been honest with me and told me she didn't understand my plan and needed some time to figure it out before she could let me know what was to be expected, that would be fine. If Taliah had apologized that I had had such bad prior experiences, but calmly explained to me that I might get charged $100 for stopping working with Cohen's, and given me a day or two to decide what to do, that would have been great. Instead I felt discriminated against because of my health plan (even though I was told to go there by my health plan) and completely disrespected as a customer.

I will never ever ever go to a Cohen's Optical again.