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?"

Comments

Justification

[hawguy]

Here's an article that attempts to justify the cost:

http://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-05-2011/hearing-aids-cost.html

Overall cost — $3,600

Costs for the manufacturer:

Materials — $360

Research — $1,080

Other retailer costs:

Rent/overhead — $450

Testing/diagnostic machines — $288

Licenses/insurance — $108

Salaries — $540

Marketing — $270

Continuing education/training — $180

Potential profit for the retailer (pretax) — $324

Approximate product cost for retailer — $1,440

I don't know how accurate it is, but I can believe that the actual parts cost of a hearing aid is around $350.?

Assembly and customization

[necro81]

Tablets, computers, etc., all can be machine-assembled, or assembled by half-way trained manual laborers in a factories that can achieve high throughput by economies of scale, division of labor, etc. And although they are densely packed, personal electronics are still, for the most part, macroscopic. The components in a hearing aid, by contract, have many miniscule components that are assembled very carefully, by hand, by skilled laborers using loupes and microscopes - more akin to watchmaking than assembly-lines. As such, the assembly labor has resisted outsourcing. Plus, the number of units being assembled by any one company (there are many players in the market) aren't large enough to support well-oiled assembly lines running 24-7. Finally, most hearing aids have some amount of customization to each patient (ear-insert moldings for some models, equalization tuning for others), which further increases cost.

Others have mentioned the addition cost associated with it being a medical device, which is not insignificant. Lastly, because many hearing aids are paid for by insurance, rather than out-of-pocket, there is less consumer-driven pressure to reduce costs.

Re:Because insurance pays for them

[Anonymous Coward]

embrace sells em for $700/ea at the high end. Don't think $2k/ea is reasonable. It's a gigantic crock of BS.
www.embracehearing.com

signed,
hard of hearing anon.

Re:Regulated medical device

[Grieviant]

Rubbish. I'd be willing to bet that they're using small variations on garden variety filtering algorithms that have been available in the open literature for many years. It's difficult to believe that they've come up with super-duper-proprietary stuff that's more complex than what you would see in video/audio processing, communications signal processing, etc. Patented does not mean better.

Re:WHAT?

[icebike]

Just like college tuition. The easier it is to fund an education the more expensive it gets.

I was going to go there, but the last time I did on Slashdot I was immediately pounced on and pummeled by people who work for universities and colleges. Apparently I had gored some sacred ox.

Finding any historical cost per credit hour data was fairly hard, schools don't really want you to see this.
I finally found some for the University of Nebraska, Kearney, a state funded school, where a 2011-12 credit hour costs $168. Back in 1964-5 this cost was 9 bucks per credit hour.

Using the Dollar Times calculator $9.00 in 1964 had the same buying power as $65.73 in 2012. So, instead of charging $65.73/ch, UNK is now charging$168, or 2.5 time the inflation equivalent per credit hour.

Kearney isn't alone in this, Central Michigan is actually worse.
They charged $85.50/ch in 1993, which had the same buying power as $135.98 in 2012, but they are charging $358/ch or 2.6 times inflation.

Admittedly, state funding levels may have changed, and more money may now be raised by tuition and fees with less tax dollar input.
Its hard to know, without digging thru the University budgets over the years.

But in any event, I suspect that you are correct, that the cost of college expands to absorb the available funds.