Eye exam mandate fades away

Their chief proponent in prison, screenings are cut from budgets

Former House Speaker Jim Black's controversial program to help children get screened for vision problems appears to be going out with a whimper.

The state budget proposals of the House and Gov. Mike Easley would eliminate the remaining $500,000 in funding for the program. Easley's budget proposal said the program drew little use in the two years since its creation.

The vision care program began as a mandate on parents to have their children seen by an optometrist before they entered kindergarten. The requirement caused an uproar after Black wrote it into the 2005 budget.

Black, a Mecklenburg County Democrat, was an optometrist, and his colleagues were a key source for political contributions. One of the scandals that eventually led to his downfall involved optometrists writing campaign contribution checks with the payee line blank so that Black and others could determine who should get them.

Black is serving a roughly five-year sentence in federal prison for taking money from chiropractors who wanted his help in passing favorable legislation. There, too, Black inserted a provision in the 2005 budget that required health insurers to treat chiropractors the same as family doctors when assessing co-payments.

In 2006, lawmakers revamped the vision care program so that it gave children without the financial means an opportunity to get comprehensive eye exams if they failed a vision screening test by a pediatrician. The program would pay for glasses if the exam found them necessary.

But in two years, the program had spent less than $50,000 and had taken care of 358 children, according to officials with the state Department of Health and Human Services. That made it low- hanging fruit for budget cutters in a tight fiscal year.

Rep. Verla Insko, a Chapel Hill Democrat, said the fact that the vision care program was another reminder of Black's legacy also didn't help.

But she said the House budget proposal tries to help children who might have qualified for the vision care program. The budget proposal includes a one-time $150,000 grant to Prevent Blindness North Carolina to expand its pre-kindergarten screening program.