Most people probably associate three things with hearing aids: an elderly demographic, beige plastic construction and high-pitched feedback in public places. As it turns out, all those notions are now obsolete\u2014or will be soon.<\/p>\n
Basic Medicare and most other insurance providers have never paid for adult hearing aids. At an average cost of $4,700 a pair, that makes hearing aids the third-largest purchase in most people\u2019s lives after a house and a car.<\/p>\n
The most popular hearing-aid style is still the one that rests over your ear – a design that debuted in the 1950s. You know what else is decades old? Our country\u2019s system for getting and paying for hearing aids.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The channel for buying hearing aids hasn\u2019t changed in 60 years, either: You must buy them from an audiologist or doctor. They\u2019re not available over the counter or by mail order.<\/p>\n
Only six companies make most of the world\u2019s hearing aids, and they sell them directly through hearing specialists. (You can buy \u201cpersonal sound amplification products\u201d in stores, but they can\u2019t be marketed as hearing aids. In any case, most are fairly crude and ineffective for severe hearing loss.)<\/p>\n
That\u2019s one reason the price of hearing aids hasn\u2019t dropped over time, the way most electronics do: the medical professionals you have to go through account for a significant fraction of the cost. Bottom line: many people who need them don\u2019t get them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the sad part,\u201d says Frank Lin, director of the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. \u201cAbout 20 percent of adults who have a hearing loss actually use a hearing aid. I mean, 20 percent. And this figure hasn\u2019t changed in decades.\u201d<\/p>\n
The other 80 percent may wind up missing out on a lot more than conversation in a noisy restaurant. Lin\u2019s studies, which followed older adults for many years, revealed that hearing loss is \u201cincredibly strongly\u201d linked to serious outcomes, including impaired thinking, greater risk of hospitalization, even dementia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What Hearing Aid to get? Most people probably associate three things with hearing aids: an elderly demographic, beige plastic construction and high-pitched feedback in public places. As it turns out, all those notions are now obsolete\u2014or will be soon. Basic Medicare and most other insurance providers have never paid for adult hearing aids. At an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[22,23,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myvisionandhearing.com\/hearing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myvisionandhearing.com\/hearing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myvisionandhearing.com\/hearing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myvisionandhearing.com\/hearing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myvisionandhearing.com\/hearing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/myvisionandhearing.com\/hearing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myvisionandhearing.com\/hearing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myvisionandhearing.com\/hearing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myvisionandhearing.com\/hearing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myvisionandhearing.com\/hearing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}