Hearing aids are too goddamned expensive
Help is on the way.
The great film director David Lean (1908-1991) had a pair of disconcertingly large ears.
I may have mentioned this before, but I’m a little deaf. About three years ago I went to an ear doctor and an audiologist. They told me I’m losing some of the high registers, which happens a lot to people in my age group, and also some of the lower registers, which is a little more unusual. The hearing loss is pretty mild (so far at least), and so, on the recommendation of David Owen—or rather on the recommendation of his excellent book, Volume Control: Hearing in A Deafening World—I bought myself a pair of Bose Hearphones. (The relevant material also appeared in this New Yorker piece.) Bose had to call this contraption Hearphones rather than hearing aids because hearing aids required a prescription and had to meet certain regulatory requirements.
The Hearphones work great, but Bose discontinued their manufacture two years ago. I don’t know precisely why, but it likely had something to do with a law passed in 2017 that for the first time legalized the sale of over-the-counter hearing aids. These will be only a bit more sophisticated than Hearphones and much, much cheaper than prescription hearing aids, which cost around $4000-$6,000. The bill got almost no attention at the time it passed; I’m a Washington journalist who focuses on regulatory issues and somehow it got past me. I learned about the bill from reading Owen’s book. Anyway, the bill passed unanimously in the House and near-unanimously in the Senate. It has the potential to make a huge difference in the lives of older people, a third to one-half of whom have hearing loss. About two-thirds of these hearing-impaired people never get hearing aids because they’re too pricey and Medicare doesn’t cover them.
The legacy hearing aids manufacturers are an oligopoly called the Big Five and they got their clocks cleaned in the 2017 bill. They didn’t appear to know much about how you lobby Congress. Now they’re trying to make up for lost time by spending a million bucks on lobbyists, even though there’s no apparent law to lobby against. They’re focusing their fire instead on the FDA, which is due to issue a final regulation soon on the specs OTC hearing aids must meet. The Big Five, of course, want these specs to limit the population the OTC companies can market to by limiting how loud the OTC hearing aids can be. Disinterested experts say the specs set by the FDA in the proposed (i.e., rough-draft) version of its rule, which would allow the OTC hearing aids to serve a much larger population of hearing-impaired people, are just fine. This is the subject of my latest New Republic piece.