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Ask Slashdot: Why Are Hearing Aids So Expensive?
solune writes "You can get a tablet these days for a few hundred dollars, and laptops for a few hundred more. Gaming consoles, TVs, and smartphones are all available for under a thousand bucks. Yet, a decent hearing aid for my mom will go upwards of $3000! With ever-shrinking electronic components, better capabilities, and technological advancements, not to mention the rapidly increasing potential user base, I would think quality hearing aids should be coming in a lot cheaper than what we can find. Adding fuel to my fire is that a hearing aid will greatly improve my mom's life — not to mention the lives of millions of others out there. Currently, she suffers from frustration and isolation with having to ask people to 'speak up', and nodding her head to things her kids and grandkids say. We've tried the cheapies, and they're fraught with problems. So, can someone tell me why a hearing aid should be so expensive?"
About 2 to 4 of every 1,000 people in the United States are "functionally deaf," though more than half became deaf relatively late in life; fewer than 1 out of every 1,000 people in the United States became deaf before 18 years of age.
However, if people with a severe hearing impairment are included with those who are deaf, then the number is 4 to 10 times higher. That is, anywhere from 9 to 22 out of every 1,000 people have a severe hearing impairment or are deaf. Again, at least half of these people reported their hearing loss after 64 years of age.
Finally, if everyone who has any kind of "trouble" with their hearing is included then anywhere from 37 to 140 out of every 1,000 people in the United States have some kind of hearing loss, with a large share being at least 65 years old.
So even at 140, even ignoring those that cannot be helped by hearing aids and those that cannot afford hearing aids, the truth is that far more than 140 out of 1,000 people buy the products you mentioned. If you move a higher volume, you can price them lower and approach their true cost as your design and overhead costs diminish with numbers. What's more is that "a laptop" will more or less work for me the same as it will work for you. We don't need to mold the laptop to put it in our ears or have it tuned to our needs.
You also seem to overlook two factors: as electronics get smaller they get more expensive. The second part is that as electronics need to power themselves and get smaller they get even more expensive. And on top of that, my cell phone puts out a lot of heat. The kind of heat I would not want in my ear. So you have to consider that the battery must be small and must not dissipate tons of heat and so therefore the electronics must have a very low power draw. There's not much of a conspiracy to find here, it's an unfortunate reality that prevents someone from storming the market with the new better cheaper hearing aid (pending tech advancements).
In my family, we look at chipping in to buy our elders hearing aids for presents, I know the nice ones are crazy expensive.
My work here is dung.
Many insurance plans don't pay for them. Medicare doesn't pay for hearing aids unless the hearing loss is the aftereffect of an accident. They generally don't cover hearing tests either. Medicare and hearing aids.
Except, insurance (generally) doesn't cover them. Mine surely didn't.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
http://www.embracehearing.com/
Just add {In Space!} to anything.
MOST insurance policies do NOT cover hearing aides. As a person who's been wearing hearing aides for the last 30+ years, I can guarantee you this. Only if you work for a much larger corporation with a VERY nice benefits package, will you find an insurance policy that will cover your hearing aides - or even a portion of it.
My last pair cost me just shy of $4000. I paid out of pocket since my insurance at the time didn't cover this expense. This is, to date, the second biggest expense I've ever paid, after my car. They were top of the range 11 years ago. I can buy an equivalent model now with the same features from Costco's hearing center now for about $500 each.
Maybe your mum doesn't need the top of the range aides? Try looking for some with fewer features - say only six channels and two or three programs each (one program for normal environment, one for noisy environment, and one for telephone use if she should so desire). You'll save a ton of money.
The other reason why hearing aides are usually so expensive is that not everybody has the same ear shape. All in-the-ear aides are made from a custom mold, which does increase the cost. My dad recently got a behind-the-ear pair that didn't include a custom mold. The tips fit into the canal, similar to a pair of newer earbud headphones. (They still cost him $1200 for the pair though.)
Your mileage may vary. I highly suggest you shop around. Just remember though - you get what you pay for, and always buy the insurance plan on the li'l buggers.
Ok, so if I just pull some random numbers out of my ass... We have 100 people. 50 have insurance and 50 don't. If they sell the hearing aid for $3000, they sell 50 of them. If they sell it for $500 they sell 100. Which makes them more money?
Exactly. In fact, remember those supply-and-demand lines from high-school economics. Basically, your revenue at any given price will be given by finding that price on the demand curve, finding the quantity that it gives you, and you multiply them. The visual way to show this is to make a square with the lower-left corner at (0,0) and the upper-right corner at some point on the demand curve. The area in that square is your revenue. But that is far from your maximum possible revenue. It turns out that, in theory, you could make revenue equal to all of the area under the demand curve. That whole triangle! Usually, that ends up being about 100% increase in revenue.
The way you pull this off is you have to be able to charge $100 from the people who are willing to pay $100 but not $101. And you have to charge $250 from the people who are willing to pay $250 but not $251, etc. In other words, you charge everybody the most that they'll pay. The economics term for this is "price discrimination". Problem is, it's tough to charge different prices from different people. First off, you have the problem of being able to secretly offering different prices to different people. Second, you have the problem of figuring out who's willing to pay more. The internet has made the first problem a non-issue... until people caught Amazon doing it. Remember about 6-7 years ago when someone noticed that, if you went to buy a product on Amazon, and if you were using the same account that you previous used to buy 4 pairs of top-of-the-line Air Jordans, Amazon would quote you a higher price than if your account was used to but Sketchers? Turned out that Amazon was figuring out how "upscale" or how "trailer-park" you tended toward in your purchases, and they could figure out how much more they could squeeze out of you.
An example which is a little closer to the hearing-aid insurance one is that of airline tickets. Ever noticed how it costs so much more to buy a round-trip ticket which does not stay over a weekend? Who would want to not stay over a weekend? Business people. Who's money are they spending? The company's. Are they going to aggressively price-shop or be willing to stay over the weekend for a better price? Nope. So, they can soak the business travelers for more money.
With insurance, it's kinda the same deal. Doctors do have "cash" prices, which they offer to patients who lack insurance, but they can't get too crazy with the price disparity or it'll start looking like insurance fraud.
Definitely there's more paperwork involved with a Class 1 medical device than say a DVD player, but if both manufacturers follow good management and development practices, it's not really that much more paperwork.
If a persons hearing in each ear is charted, frequency versus sensitivity you fine a lot of variation in people with hearing loss at various frequencies caused by various legal and not legal drugs, loud music, impulse noise from Guns of jets etc. The hearing aid is then programmed to boost/cut various frequencies to get as close as possible to the natural ear with no deficiencies. They have built in equalization. The better the resolution of this equalization and the better the job the audiologists do and the better hearing aid purchased = best results. The hearing aid itself has a base cost of about $50, plus fees to program each one, test with the person in a quiet room, fit to the ear drum shape etc, all adds cost. Low power, more efficient units cost more = last longer on smaller battery
That said, there are many ripoffs out there, and many locked up distribution channels by people who want to sell a $50 item for $2000. Hearing loss forums can help, but they get a lot of manufacturers shills in there, takes a while to know the crooks.
Familiar with duplexer tuning, however a hearing aid is mono-directional, and as solidraven (1633185) says, determining the gain versus frequency profile should be quick. Frequencies that have gone fully deaf - no cochlear hairs left, will probably not be compensatable with an external device, we can directly stimulate the nerves with a cochlear implant, after which the person learns to hear anew. Here is a simple youtube about it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmNpP2fr57A, the comments are also of interest. This search is also useful http://tinyurl.com/cq8bz3w.
It is my understanding that you can buy the programmable chip that is a complete processor heart of a hearing aid from many makers. Here is another search on that topic.
http://tinyurl.com/cwcuwuq.