Hearing Aids in America (High Cost)

Costing between $700 & $10,000 a pair, hearing aids nothing more than a battery-operated microphone & speaker with a little tiny logic board with DSP & wireless to pair with your phone, something Apple & Samsung & Bose & others offer at a fraction of this cost #BusinessInsider #HearingAids #Technology

You might wonder why hearing aids are so expensive. It comes down to the custom fit by a trained highly paid audiologist, characterization formally of exactly the nature of the individuals specific hearing loss, noting also there are psychoacoustical aspects of hearing loss that have more to do with cognitive dysfunction or psychosis or specific drug side effects that are not related to ear sound pressure detection or ear nerve functional generation of sound signals for the brain to process & interpret. 

Hearing loss generally progressive & cumulative, like aging itself. Eyes similarly progressively lose sensitivity to light such that an average person at 80 years of age needs twice as much light to see subjects with the same contrast level as the average 30-year-old person. Staying active physically & mentally helps to stave off or prevent age related declines, as does protecting your eyes from UV with UV400 or UV800 sunglasses or contacts coated to block UV or prescription glasses with multicoated UV blocking lenses, anti-fog & anti-reflection coatings & polarization are all good optional PVD & CVD coatings for polymer & glass lenses in eyeglasses. 

Only about 1/3 of the cost of prescription hearing aids, which typically cost the patient several thousand dollars per pair, are from the hearing aid device. The other 2/3rds of cost come from custom molding the ear canal of the patient with a silicone fluid injection that hardens up into a flexible rubbery mold, that is then scanned into special computer software by a lab technician who creates a 3D printed resin acrylic housing for the hearing aid electronics that fits near perfectly in the patient's ear with the best comfort since it was customized for their uniquely shaped ear fitment. 

Related tuning of the waveform DSP function by the audiologist to tune the hearing aids to your specific hearing aid requirements. Servicing of the hearing aids at the audiologist office & ongoing battery costs of zinc air batteries 312 size, 13 size, 606 size or similar. When you remove the plastic tab from a zinc air hearing aid battery, let the battery rest for 1 minute in open air to activate the battery before inserting it into your hearing aid. Cleaning the hearing aid of debris & ear wax that foreign matter attaches too during insertion or removal or by transfer contact with your fingers also imporant. Make sure to think of hearing aids like contact lenses, cleaner is better to prevent ear infections & buildup that can block the sound output of the hearing aid. 

A new law S670 passed to deregulate hearing aids to reduce patient costs since only 20% of American's that need hearing aids actually have them. This was passed as part of the Affordable Care Act to help regular members of the public in America to access better healthcare products & services at lower prices or at lower costs since the living costs in America, rising housing, taxes, energy & other costs are making people increasingly less wealthy or unable to purchase things they might need or want, just so they can pay the rising costs of life's basics, food, drink, clothing, housing, transportation, entertainment, computer & cell phone replacement, batteries, car repairs, home repairs, tires, fuel, electricity, natural gas, replacement appliances that fail & are not practical to repair because the repair costs are similar to replacement costs of poorly made abroad appliances that do not hold up or last like older made in America appliances sold before 2003. Speed Queen clothing washer & driers & Sun Frost Fridges are some of the only reliable & designed to be long lasting appliances still sold as of 2021.

Watch the Business Insider Video on YouTube about Hearing Aid's in America 

How Millions of Hearing Aids Are Made in America | Big Business https://youtu.be/Eri08ZZ1Kmo

Only one manufacturer of hearing aids in America, Starkey, While there are dozens of brands, there are only 5 major companies in the world that manufacture hearing aids. This lack of competition or extensive vertical integration & conglomeration also seen in the eyewear market where industry titan Milan, Italy based Luxottica controls most production & brands. In the automotive space, we have a few multinational companies like VW, Toyota, GM, & Stellantis, that control & own most automobile manufacturing & brands worldwide. 

Most brands are illusions, where a few big companies control lots of brands. This merger & acquisition trend accompanied globalization & capital accumulation where only the largest wealthiest companies can afford to build new mining capacity to make more raw materials available for product production & where only the most profitable companies can build the new factories & tooling to make advanced products. 

Consider TSMC, Apple's manufactures of the chipsets in the latest iPhone or M1 processor in Mac computers & laptops. Intel an integrated chip designer & manufacturer, while ASML a small Dutch companies makes the latest deep ultraviolet lithography machines, that cost $150,000,000 each & take months to ship in parts & months more to assemble in Clean Rooms the most expensive to build & operate spaces in the world; they have the cleanest conditions because even a single dust particle can interfere with the light pattern projection that etches the features, layer by layer into integrate circuits, those fingernail sized chips that provide the core logic functionality of most electronics, vehicles, appliances, machines, computers, servers, telecom equipment, & all sort of other electrical appliances & functional devices & COTS.

Hearing aids are a type of COTS, consumer off the shelf technology, often leveraging some of the best sound image processing in tiny power efficient digital signal processing circuits, that now can pair with NFC, Bluetooth & or WIFI to a smartphone where a related App can control the functions of the smart hearing aids. 

Surgery up to 10x more expensive in America than in India for example. The same make & model of Motorcycle that sells for $1500 USD2021 in India sells for $6000 + in America, though the one sold in America contains a 3 way catalytic converter, a pair of O2 or oxygen sensors that measure exhaust gas temperatures pre & post the exhaust catalyst, often one installed in the exhaust header & one just behind the catalytic converter; pressure sensors & crank angle sensor & a powerful power efficient 32bit ECU with dynamic fuel control mapping with emissions control functions to minimize tailpipe emissions of toxic gases. There are higher safety standards in America too, for the motorcycle manufacture to meet & at the hospitals. The staff of American's hospitals are paid more, they have better newer equipment, better diagnostic tests & lab testing capacity, are cleaner & more hygienic & have more services available, in buildings that cost more to build & operate. This plus the health insurance scam in America causes medical services to cost a lot more. 

The only reason Starkey able to make Hearing Aids in America, because it was integrated in 1967 & owns its manufacturing capacity & has in house specialized machines & training & software & intellectual property, such that they have a competitive edge & are able to stay profitable against foreign competitors that enjoy lower cost advantages of cheaper employees, stollen IP & cheaper buildings, lower taxes or no taxes, no L&I or worker benefits & other relative & comparative cost advantages, especially in China in FEZ's or free economic zones that collude with the central Chinese banks to operate at losses or no or negative profit just in order to bankrupt their foreign competitors, the very companies that the Chinese stole the intellectual property from to make fake products, clones, forgeries & other rip-off's.

The CCP & PRC are highly immoral & unethical & one of the worst governments & countries respectively, in the world. Sadly, it was former President Richard Nixon who opened trade negotiations with China, a change that resulted in broad offshoring & outsourcing of manufacturing, the closing or shuttering of most American factories in a process that has progressively weakened the US economy while providing fewer jobs for workers & lower paying jobs in the face of ever increasing life costs, something referred to as the marginalization of the middle class, where the dream of home ownership fading for many, many slipping from middle class to lower class as the tiny opulent minority of billionaires increasing their personal wealth progressively - something I call a plutocracy given the lack of actually representation in Government of the American public, the pandering of special interests that pay for increasingly expensive political campaigns & with bribery & corruption for special favors via extensive perverted lobbying.

Because of my loquacious extroverted nature & ability to use rhetoric to convince others of something, I was encouraged to become a lobbyist as a child & adolescent. I might have done this if I had not learned about the reality of lobbying corruption & the perversion of Americas egalitarian social progress & social security & Medicare & Medicaid, in high school in Mr. Schneiders contemporary world affairs class where he showed us pictures & videos of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, dirty buildings in disrepair, radical income inequality, billionaire owners of industries that previously belonged to the communist government while a middle class does not really exist in any meaningful way & where most Russian people or the public in Russia are working poor or just poor. I flew around Moscow in VR for many hours looking for a casual restaurant like many of those found in Western Europe or America & found only very expensive white cloth high end rich person establishments or very cheap food carts & very low-cost eateries, nothing in-between with medium prices, only very cheap or very expensive, reflective of the extreme income inequality in Russia that Mr. Schneider had taught me about many years before consumer VR in the form of Facebook Go became a consumer electronic that lets regular people fly around in 3D Google Earth maps, Oculus Rift & similar from HTC Vive & others. 

Speaking of VR, these headsets provide stereo vision & sound to simulate reality & are very immersive when compared to the common HID or human interface device layer of smartphones, tablets, laptop, & computers, namely a keyboard, touchscreen, display, user interface software, provides a window like view into the digital landscape, online, locally, over a local area network or LAN or public area network or PAN or corporate area network CAN, over Wife or 4G LTE or 5G wireless networks.