What a traumatic story. And what a great provider you are for sticking with your patient. I am glad she got some respite from her condition. Thanks for sharing this
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Regarding the service fee, all the Audi is doing for their 150/year is offering a check in service and tune up. It isn’t the full service that would be offered if I had bought the devices in the US from that audi, I suspect. If the aids break after 1 year I have to ship them back to the UK. I don’t anticipate getting a loaner in the way I might if I were a fully fledged customer.
Maybe you could discuss what is in the $1400/3 year agreement and, dare I say it, unbundle it! You may find they’ve included insurance etc.
If you actually bought from ebay you’d know that everything has a 30 day guarantee now. As long as you take the pair to your audi to get checked and programmed / tuned within that time, you have no risk. I’ve bought several pairs on ebay over the years including my $600 pair of Livio 2400s, and only once had a problem. I’ve saved thousand$!
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daali, is there an online description of the noah wireless link and the Phonak Target 6.x application and how to use them with Phonak Audeo Marvel? Do they come with a user manual?
OK so how does one “save” their current settings before embarking upon an illegal journey of self discovery in the world of DIY with Target?? And how do you reload that saved copy if upon your journey you happen to screw up? Inquiring minds want to know…
Thanks…
I just PM’d you. Click your profile circle to read you PM’s. I also might be helpful if you post your Audiogram.
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Got it…thanks. I have all the tools…just needed a quick answer on how to save the settings from my ha’s.
When Target connects to your HAs, it asks whether to use the settings from the HAs or from the current session. You answer from the HAs. Then you close and save the session to the database (but not to the HAs, in case you accidentally changed something since you loaded from them). To restore at any later time, you can open that session (as long as you haven’t explicitly deleted it), connect to the HAs, answer from the current session (i.e., the old saved one), close and save the session to the HAs.
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Don’t just trust the local database on your Target setup to be a perfect fail-safe. What if you lose your setup?
I believe you can also EXPORT a saved session as a file you can store somewhere else, so that if you ever lose your installed software setup, you can do a fresh install, IMPORT your backed up file into a session, and restore your HA fitment.
Email that file to yourself, and you can always restore your HA fitment from any Target software setup.
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Indeed. I export the client (I don’t think you can export a single session) after every session to a local directory that’s mirrored in the cloud.
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Mandate to what? (News to me.)
Probably does not matter. My health insurance paid $32 for a $100 hearing test, and after that it’s all my money. (Unless the mandate goes further?)
It requires $3,000 per ear to be covered by private health insurance. There are some exemptions for organizations that are self-insured, though.
https://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bills/bills_129th/billtexts/HP003901.asp
I wouldn’t mind being a provider in Maine right about now!
@hparsons Just to clarify a misconception (and granting that I haven’t been through the whole thread here)…Federal employees (a group to which I also belong) do not get 100% hearing aid insurance coverage on any plan I have looked into. All the plans available to me offer the same adults every 3 yrs @ $1250/ear with the subscriber paying the delta. Coverage for under 26 year old dependents is different though.
I am trying to visualize how this works to me. My coverage is State Employee, Retired, from a mid-Atlantic state, now over-rode by Medicare (with ex-job secondary) but I have been in Maine for a decade. The insurance works ($60k of pee-trouble this year), but sometimes needs a push. There may be very few from my old state now in Maine. The insurer may not know of this mandate. (Yes, there is an office which reads all the news, but it doesn’t trickle-down to claims agents.)
It is very darn interesting. I wrote $1400 of my own money last week of 2019, and at that I may be one of the less-poor folks around. I could now self-justify two $2500 aids if I could afford it; this Mandate says I can.
However the AARP article is dated October. My AuD didn’t know this news? To suggest I wait a bit? He could have more than doubled his billing. Him and the other AuD in town should be outside the WalMart shilling for business. And it would help; there are a lot of HoH folks here.
Thanks again.
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This is my experience, too. BCBS Federal and GEHA both offer total of $2500 per set every 3 years like clockwork. My favorite insurances to work with.
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From what I read, the law took effect on New Year’s Day.
From another story:
“Initially, there was some confusion about who will benefit from the mandate. Today state insurance officials clarified that only people with private insurance and state-employee health plans are eligible to receive the benefit. The mandate requires insurers to cover the cost of hearing aids up to $3,000 per ear every three years.” (emphasis mine)
I know this is an older thread, but thought I’d follow up with what my experience has been.
First, my experiences with the M90’s I bought on eBay. I’ve been very satisfied with them. They were pretty much everything I wanted in a set of HAs. The app was slow to connect sometimes, and I’ve had a persistent problem with feedback on the left side (more on that in a bit), but overall I’ve been happy with them. Oh, I forgot, I very much DISLIKE the new wax guard system they have. I’ll touch on that in a bit too.
So now the overall experience of buying from eBay. I’m satisfied with what happened, and there were no major surprises. I got a set of state of the art HAs at a price I could afford. Yes, there were issues, and yes, I would have REALLY preferred to buy the normal way, but I got what I paid for, and was happy.
Probably the single biggest complaint I had was that the audiologist I used did not do remote sessions. I didn’t mind paying the fee for his services, but I hated taking half a day off work to do it, and the hassle of going out to his office. As I mentioned, I’ve had a persistent problem with feedback, and the cost and hassle led me to finally just accepting the issue, and working with them as best I could (turning them down they started feeding back).
There were other downsides, but I pretty much knew that was going to happen. I mentioned the feedback, and no remote sessions. Bummer. Also, I seem to be pretty clumsy with the newer Phonak “CeruShield”. I had trouble with them on both receivers, and had to have the audiologist pull them out. One couldn’t be fixed, so I had to buy a new receiver. Then about 7 or 8 months ago, one of the receivers broke as I was pulling it out of my ear. These things would have been covered had I bought a bundled package, but I still saved money over all. Plus, I simply did not have the money it would have taken at the time.
Then a couple of months ago, I ended up going underwater in the pool with my HAs in. 2 weeks later, the left one started giving me static. After a few days, it got so bad I quit wearing them. I understand this would have likely been covered had I purchased a bundled package. I took a chance, and missed out, some.
However, there’s a bright side for me. I work as a government contractor. That means that although I’m surrounded by workers that have government insurance plans, I (typically) do now. However, our contract was taken over by a Native Tribe owned company, and their employees get to participate in the Federal insurance program. (The fed insurance was mentioned a couple of times in this thread). What I didn’t know when I mentioned federal insurance programs earlier is that there are different policies (about 19 for my state), and they differ somewhat state to state. The new insurance I chose provides up to $2500 for hearing aids ($1250 per ear) once every five years. I was able to find a Phonak Audeo Paradise 90s for $1850 each, so I was able to trade up for a reasonable amount out of pocket. The company is in another state, but they remote support, and my fitting today went without a hitch.
Overall, I still feel the “eBay experience” was good for me. It gave me what I needed at the time at a price I could afford, and showed me the value of having a bundled package with an audiologist available as well.
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Do you still have problems with feedback? They should be able to be solved with good fitting custom molds. The loss in the left ear especially would benefit from custom molds.
The new audiologist is going to try some settings first, but I’ve already considered I may have to go to custom molds.
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