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

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