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My 102 year old aunt cannot afford $6000. Any ideas?

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Lions Club offers hearing aids for $300 each. That might be more affordable. Your aunt would see an audiologist selected by the Lions Club for testing. Aids have to be paid for prior to the testing though.

Maggie, I'm interested in these amplifiers. Are they "one size fits all", or are they like hearing aids that are adjusted for the individual?

We too balked at paying $3K to $4K per hearing aid. That's just exploitive.
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Ronnie, I am not and never have been employed by the hearing aid industry! On the contrary, I bear the scars from battling their exploitative hard-sell practices myself on behalf of several relatives, including my mother. But modern digital hearing aids are NOT just amplifiers, and if you have an elder who wants the in-ear discreet type they ARE made to measure, from impressions, like dentures.

If you or your elder don't need the bells-and-whistles variety then good luck to you - some people also do have visual impairments that are easily corrected by off the shelf magnifying glasses, too, that are as cheap as chips, and good for them. All I'm saying is, find out what you need, how it works and what you're paying for before you buy.
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Oops. Having named names, I'd better take it back about Amplifon in Hereford, in case anyone's reading this: for five years they have doggedly maintained, adjusted, cleaned and repaired my mother's (dizzyingly expensive) hearing aids free of charge, testing her hearing at 6-monthly intervals, and I cannot fault their service. The one thing they haven't done is figure out how to make her WEAR the d*mn-and-blast things...
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There are plenty of them on ebay. What makes them so expensive? The cost of setup and adjustments by a technician.
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Whatever type you get for your aunt, don't expect miracles. As my cousin pointed out to me, if you draw a parallel between seeing and hearing, then wearing a hearing aid isn't like putting on a pair of glasses - it's more like turning on a bright light. It's uncomfortable, and it takes time and effort to gain any real benefit. Meanwhile, if your aunt's hearing loss is severe and has been for some time, then there won't be just an ear problem - the brain functions that perceive and interpret sound will also have deteriorated and again it takes perseverance to get much of it back.

If your aunt has got to 102 without one, then by all means try them but to be honest the chances of its doing her much good are not great.

This is also a heads-up about hearing aids in general - get one the minute you think you need one. And about the prices: it's not that simple. If you want an amplifier, fine; get an amplifier. But modern digital hearing aids are miniature computers that sit virtually invisibly in your ears and achieve prodigies of sound reproduction. I agree the prices are inflated, but a) there's nothing wrong with asking for a discount and b) you're not getting nothing for your money. When hearing aids don't work too well it's generally either because people aren't following their audiologists' instructions in full or because their audiologist failed to manage expectations sensibly.

Can you get a used one? It depends what you're after. But the top end ones are made to measure (it would be like buying used dentures and expecting them to fit); and any aid with a microprocessor, as Pam S pointed out, is going to need adjusting by a technician - and they'll only do that free of charge for original customers, I should think.
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There is a wireless amplifier that has a simple speaker worn around the neck. It works well for TV watching and general conversations.
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Ronnie, "the long and the short and the tall.." ??
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Beware of simple amplifiers if you have high frequency loss, which is what I have - low pitch sounds may be amplified so much that speech is unintelligible, just louder, which is not what you want. I will even get headaches from amplification of low pitches. no if they would create a little portable "treble boost" device of some sort, I would probably be able to use it, customized or no! My car radio is turned all the way down on the bass and up on the treble and that works for me.

You can look on e-bay for ideas but make sure your own audiologist is willing and able to do adjustment on whatever you purchase.
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Henrietta, I'm with Mr. Bray on that. My current aid, which is a Phonak and its about that old, works quite well; I am saving up to switch to receiver-in-canal because I could use something a little stronger and that would also help with phones and stethoscopes, plus might be safer from moisture in very light rain. My colleague with normal ears (and a lower pitched voice that I can always hear incredibly well, especially while I am trying to hear a soft spoken young resident trying to present a case to me :-) does find it a little annoying to have to turn down the volume all the time on the phone we share in clinic.
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CM, get a prescription?? That's an excellent idea!

The audiologists we've seen don't write prescriptions, as if they were glasses. The only details are in their notes. So, no, it's not possible to shop for a better price but that's an excellent suggestion. I'm going to try that the next time we see an audiologist.

What they generally do is insulting - they send out marketing propaganda offering $1k or so off the price of a hearing aid. There's no indication of what that price is. Then after the exam, they drop the bomb that the aids cost $4k or so, but there's this great deal to get $1k off each aid. As if we're dumb enough to believe that.

I think the issue is that they have a monopoly. Generally speaking it's the older people who need hearing aids, although I suspect that anyone who listens to rap is going to need hearing aids in a decade or so.

When there's a limited market, the suppliers can be price controlling, and they are.
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