Ear Gizmo Helps Stop Stuttering

gregger writes "This little thing that looks like a hearing aid is called a "Speecheasy." It sits in your ear and creates something called the "choral effect" which in essence echoes what the wearer is saying. The real choral effect (i.e. when you recite something in a group like pledges of allegiance or other dark rituals) seems to help people that stutter speak more fluently. The price for this thing is quoted in the KRON TV story as being between $3,600 - $5,100. Porky Pig's insurance won't buy it for him either."

Comments

It really works!

[nomel]

I saw this sometime last year on Oprah or something. It worked by making them sound like chipmunks to themselves. Some of the guys couldn't even say a complete sentence (which I consider very disabling), and when they put it on, they could talk fluently, almost without any sign of studdering. They were VERY happy people. In bad cases like that. I see no problem with insurance companies paying for it. It is a cure for a very bad disability (unlike breast implants, which are just for fun). It really doesn't cost that much either. Every time I've gone to the doctor or emergency room, it's cost well over $1500. The cost per happiness for the rest of their lives ratio is very high, which I consider worth it.

Re:It really works!

[Jackazz]

It is a cure for a very bad disability (unlike breast implants, which are just for fun).

This statement is not entirely correct, breast implants do have valid medical use and should be covered by medical insurance in many situations. Breast reconstructive surgery after radical mastectomy is a vital technology used to help decrease the stress of surgery in breast cancer patients.

Obviously I do agree that a device like this should be covered too, just like a wheelchair is covered for paraplegics.

Re:Insurance shouldn't pay for this

[agrounds]

okay, I'll bite. By this rational what should be covered? The rising costs of medical insurance is fed entirely by the medical industry. It's a vicious circle that only winds up raping the people in the end. The medical industry in the US is a financial shambles. I paid $860 for a two-block ambulance ride a couple of years ago. That's 2 (two) blocks. No life-saving procedures, no fancy equipment used. Just me, sitting on a stretcher nursing a scalp laceration next to an EMT and bitching out the drunk driver that had just totalled my car. $860? I paid $3500 for my son to have an MRI. Why? Because he had fallen and given himself a nice black eye and a bloody nose. I protested the procedure, and was told that if I interfered with the procedures, I would be asked to leave the hospital as AMA (Against Medical Advice) with no further treatment rendered. This is the real reason mine and your insurance rates go up. Not because people want frivolous (of which this device is -not-) procedures covered, but because the industry has raised the rates to exorbitant levels in an effort to line their own pockets. I honestly don't know how these people sleep at night. You'd think someone in a position of authority would do something, but it's hard to stab your campaign contributors in the back I suppose.

Fuck that. This should be covered, along with LASIK, hearing aids, braces, birth control, and anything else that is not purely cosmetic. My $773 a month in insurance premiums should damn well cover anything I want to improve my direct quality of life.

Don't blame the people that want something to help with their debilitations, blame the industry that sets the financial bar too high with no recourse.

Insurance should pay for this, maybe...

[SolemnDragon]

I stutter. It took years of speech therapy to learn not to, at a remarkably high cost- most of which was absorbed by the SCHOOL department. If they hadn't, I would still be stuttering all the time. I never could have learned to sing (As it was I took 14th place out of thousands of applicants in the statewide concert auditions in junior high. Learning not to stutter was tough, REALLY tough, and i still can't read aloud very well.)

It's not about mere discrimination. It's not about mere disability, although it can be a true disability- My uncle has a stutter so bad that he can barely talk. It takes a long time to get a sentence out. It has severely limited his employability and his lifestyle. It has to do with Money, with wage-earning potential, with the possibility of advancement. This translates into- you guessed it- taxpayer dollars.

In reference to your comment. I agree that LASIK probably shouldn't be covered by health insurance. Eyeglasses ARE covered under an increasing number of plans, though, and should be. (Eyeglasses also don't run into the thousands of dollars, for the most part.) Given the choice between spending $2000 max for this device, and having a person then shoot up an income bracket(or more) of employability, OR leaving the person to spend tens of thousands on speech therapy (have you added up the cost for ten years of learning how to control a stutter?) the US gov. gets off cheap if this can help. A severe stutter changes education, changes willingness to participate in experiences that their peers are involved in, and later in life it can make a college or job interview into hell. And here's the thing- it's now preventable. So when speech therapy isn't working, should health coverage take care of this? Heck, yeah!

This concept applies to a lot of things. It's cheaper for health coverage to buy me a wheelchair, or pay for part of the costs thereof, than to leave to try to buy one on my own- because it keeps me employable, keeps me paying for my own health insurance through work, keeps me paying income taxes. That's a pretty big deal, really. Eyeglasses should be covered for the same reason.

I've found that there are some cases where cosmetic surgery is justified and paid for by health coverage as a quality of life issue. If you view the speech improvement device as a prosthetic- making up for a quality that the person should have but doesn't- it's no different from covering, say, a hearing aid or an artificial voicebox. Or a prosthetic foot. If a person is disfigured or injured in a way which significantly decreases their odds of living a halfway decent life, health coverage will frequently cover the cost of alteration. For example, if a child is born with a severely receding lower jaw, as a friend of mine was, it was not considered cosmetic but reparative surgery. This extends to other forms of therapy- lots of health insurance covers mental therapy and medication for treatable mental illnesses. A stutter isn't a mental illness, it's a brain malfunction. SOmetimes speech therapy works great. Sometimes, as with my uncle, it doesn't help at all. I remember being a child and trying to have conversations with him, wondering whether i was going to end up like that, taking five minutes to finish a sentence. While LASIK could also be considered reparative surgery, it generally isn't because the prosthetics (eyeglasses) are socially accepted to the point of being a norm, contact lenses are available for cosmetic improvement over glasses, and both contacts and glasses are inexpensive enough that many health insurers already cover them. In some cases, free care even covers them. LASIK is also still fairly new. I know that breast implants can be covered in cases of masectomy. I would imagine that as LASIK gets cheaper and more reliable- there are still a lot of errors and i personally know two people who had serious complications (and twelve who had no complications at all)- there may well be insurance that covers it soon.

My main point here is that w

Re:Insurance shouldn't pay for this

[Strange Ranger]

GuyMannDude - WAY off.
agrounds - closer but no.

Do not blame doctors for lining their own pockets. 3 groups take all the blame: The American Medical Association, Health Insurance, and Lawyers.

Lawyers: Because every hospital AND every doctor has to have multimillion dollar liability/lawsuit protection. This is why you agrounds, were asked to get with their program or leave. Their insurance company requires that they operate this way. Their lawyers require it. They have to protect themselves from lawsuits. That's why the Ambulance ride cost so much, because they need to be insured against lawsuits. To make matters worse, they have to do everything 3 times and get concurrency/agreement from other doctors all to ward off the lawsuits. So not only are you paying for insurance, you're paying for more doctors time and more procedures all to protect against lawsuits. There goes well over half of your $773 / mo. In this case, it's the legal system that has failed us, not doctors or the medical system.

Health Insurance: Even though drug Foo2 is the best, fastest cure, and the one your doctor actually prescribed to begin with, in order to get coverage you must try drug Foo1 for 60 days first to see if it works because its far cheaper, and hey, it might work, or you might drive off a cliff during those 2 months, either way the insurance co avoids paying for the high cost drug. The stockholders win, the patient loses. OR, you go two months with ineffective meds and you have to pay 2 months of copay to the pharmacist for something you don't even want. The Insurance co ends up covering both drugs, but hey, they only need their strategy to succeed 1 time in 50 for the numbers to work in their favor, because another large hunk of your $773/ mo bill is used to subsidize the priciest 1% of drugs that a few other people need. Don't blame the doctors.

The AMA: Arguably one of the most self-serving immoral group of shucksters ever to organize. The original purpose of the AMA was to lobby for laws that made prescriptions a requirement. Back in the late 1800's before antibiotics, doctors could do about 2 things, set broken bones, and alleviate pain. Got pneumonia? Take some morphine. If you had no broken bones, the only way to get you to go pay a doctor for something was to require BY LAW that you get a prescription for the pain reliever. The next evil thing the AMA did was to make law school extremely selective, long, difficult, and expensive Why does it cost more to become a medical doctor than it does to become a doctor of organic chemistry? Lab fees?? Heck no. Simple, the less doctors there are the more demand there is so the more they can charge. Why does a podiatrist have to learn all about the mucus system and neuro-chemical pathways in the brain, but has to learn almost nothing about nutrition? Simple, to keep the number of podiatrists down. If nutrition was complex enough and had its own arcane language you can bet it would be required as well. Why does an Ear, Nose, & Throat doctor need to learn all about the ovaries? Same reason. That's why medical school takes so damn long. That's why you have to wait months to get in to see a dermatologist. Because there aren't many people who can get into, afford, and then survive the schooling. So there are far too few doctors. Granted that some of this is warranted is some cases, brain surgery for instance. But the process to become a podiatrist or a dermatologist should be nowhere near as long and arduous as the process to become a neurosurgeon. Yet it is for the most part. Low Supply + High Demand = High Price. You ever hear of doctors competing on price?? No way. It's not really their fault though, that's just the way the market works in their case. In fact it's so out of hand now that a cheap doctor isn't thought of as benevolent, he's thought of as a third-rate hack! 99% of doctors, 99% of the medical industry, are not to blame her