I’ve seen numerous full-page ads in the newspaper for hearing aids. There’s never a price, just some offer of a free trial. The use of full-page ads leads me to believe that there is a very high margin in the hearing aid business.
What do hearing aids sell for? How big is the margin on these devices?
They can range from a couple of hundred dollars to many thousands - my dad’s were $6,800 I believe, but he had a fairly bad hearing issue.
My FIL paid $7,000 for his pair. I found that incredible. There must be a huge markup on those things.
The hotsy-totsy ones are digital, which can make a HUGE difference in the quality of the sound. And you are also paying for the miniturization.
When I was a kid, a hearing aid was a little bit bigger than a pack of cigarettes, and connected by a wire to a plug which was inserted in the ear.
Nowadays, you can get behind-the-ear, in-the-ear, or in-the-canal.
The more severe the loss, generally, the larger the hearing-aid.
And I want to point out that a hearing aid does NOT provide the type of correction you get with a pair of glasses! You DON’T put on a hearing aid, and hear as well as you did when you were eighteen.
For the most part, a hearing aid provides amplification, and if there is difficulty in discerning sounds (typically speech), amplified noise is STILL noise.
~VOW
My hearing aids cost me about $3,000. And it was good money spent.
The electronic ones do not just amplify all sound. But amplify the frequencies that I have a hard time hearing. This means that I have an easier time understanding speach. So now not all noise is just noise, but I can make since of sounds around me.
I went to a concert after getting them and I could really understand the singers for the first time. I could hear most of each word sung instead only a few.
They are adjusted by computer at the place where I picked them up. I have three modes. Normal, High noise area (some filtering), and telephone for used with my cell phone.
My Dad, who is 65, has minor hearing loss. He can’t hear very well in crowded areas, but is otherwise fine. Two hearing aids for him were going to run $4,000.
And Medicare won’t pay one dime for them…neither will his insurance.
He’s fine without them, honestly.
Here in Germany, a normal, non-fancy hearing aid paid for by the health insurance costs about 300 Euros, and amplifies everything.
A digital one which at least tries to filter out noise and amplify speech, costs 3 000. (Guess which one my mother doesn’t want to spend money on despite serious hearing problems).
I once saw a brochure for users of hearing aids titled “It’s called ‘hearing aid’ and not ‘understanding aid’ because you won’t understand everything automatically”.
Compare $7,000 for hearing aids to $300 for an iphone. It’s hard to believe that the electronics in a hearing aid are anywhere comparable to those in the iphone, and yet the hearing aids cost 20 times as much.
Huge markup indeed.
Demand. If as many people wanted and were willing to pay for hearing aids as want iphones, price would come down by a lot.
If I had a hearing aid I would want it to look like a pack of cigarettes (or an i-phone, for that matter). The cost of the extreme miniaturization must be enormous. And there would be two real benefits: first, it could use an ordinary rechargeable AA or AAA battery and second, it would clue people in that I had a hearing problem. For the first, I have a couple good friends who have serious hearing loss and avoid using their aids because of the cost of the batteries (which are also impossibly hard to handle they are so tiny). Isn’t that ridiculous? But such large aids are simply not made. Because, apparently, people are so vain, they don’t want their aids visible. Not everybody wears contacts, you know. I have worn glasses since 3rd grade and the idea of contact lenses revolts me.
The hearing loss in my right ear is so great that my doctor suggested not bothering. My in-the-canal device for my left ear cost $3,000. The #10 batteries are about a buck a piece and last around 2 1/2 days.
Mine were latest technology (at the time, three years ago) and cost $3000 each. I was given both of them to test out, for free, for a month; my findings were that I only needed one in left ear, putting the other in the right ear didn’t make much diff. They are small, and not obvious, hard to see that it’s there unless you know or look carefully.
Part of the outrageous cost is paying for fitting, often by somebody that fails to listen to your problems. At http://www.americahears.com/ $1000 gets you a hearing aid and the software to program it yourself.
I find this pretty unbelievable / outrageous. I wear 2 very high-tech hearing aids and I paid a little over $3000 for the pair. I’m essentially deaf in one ear. I wear a hearing aid on that side that picks up the sound and transmits it via radio frequencies to the hearing aid in my good ear. The hearing aid in my good ear only amplifies the frequencies that I lack in that ear. So that hearing aid does double duty: it amplifies the sound on that side, and it receives the transmitted sound from the hearing aid in my bad ear. And it does this in a package only 5/8" long.
I suggest your FIL shop around next time for a better deal.
J.
Mahaloth; I do hope you have subscribed to this thread so you see the reply. I just got new hearing aids yesterday and they didn’t cost me a cent.
My son, who also has a hearing problem mentioned the fact that I was hard-of-hearing to his audiologist and guess what? She had hearing aids that had been donated to her and gave them to me at no cost. Medicare paid for the hearing test (necessary to program the aids) and she fitted and adjusted the aids at no cost. After forty years of not hearing well, I am now learning to hear again.
Check around in your area and see if you can find a pair of donated hearing aids just waiting for a new owner.
They can do more than that.
As noted upthread, you can get hearing aids that transmit signals from one ear to the other, so sounds on your deaf side get heard clearly on your good side.
As you describe, they can be programmed to amplify sounds in the frequency range where your hearing isn’t so good.
If you’ve got frequency ranges in which you have profound hearing loss, they can be programmed to shift those incoming frequencies (think “autotune”) and play them to you within a different frequency range where your hearing acuity is acceptable. It’s not so much about tweaking the fundamental frequency so that Andre the Giant sounds like Jennifer Tilly; rather, it’s about getting the higher harmonics into a range that you can hear, so that (for example) you can tell the difference between “are” and “all.”
They can use directional microphones for ambient noise reduction, so you can achieve good clarity for a sound source directly in front of you (e.g. a conversational partner sitting across from you at a restaurant) while blocking out noises that are coming from other directions.
In short, there is a LOT of digital signal processing going on.
In an extremely small package.
That runs for a reasonable length of time on an extremely small battery.
Things in your iPhone are small, but not this small, and they make and sell a SHITLOAD of iPhones, so all that R&D cost gets spread out over millions of them. Hearing aids don’t sell nearly as many units, so each one bears a larger share of the R&D cost. Several thousand dollars seems to be the norm for a set of custom-fitted hearing aids with the aforementioned capabilities.
+1 on this.
I have a severe hearing loss in my right ear and I’m slowly losing my hearing in my left ear. I got hearing aids about six years ago; they cost $4k for the set. They were tuned specifically, left and right, to my audiogram and restored most of the hearing in my left ear and brought my right ear up to about 35-40% (from 5% or so unaided). They also had a switch that I could hit to change them from omni to directional, where they picked up sound only from my line of sight.
I had to quit wearing them. I have trouble hearing in crowded restaurants, etc., where there is a lot of background noise. All the aids did was amplify that noise. The world is a damn loud place, and I kinda like the quiet. However, SWMBO doesn’t, because she has to yell at me to get my attention and I miss a lot of what she says. I’ll probably go and investigate the current generation of aids, but I’m not enthusiastic about them.
Don’t forget that there’s also the fact that good hearing aids are not mass produced.
Mine were $3,600 for the pair three years ago. Brand is Oticon. Check their web site.