After being in the industry for over 44 years and using dozens of manufacturers (many no longer in business due to mergers and take overs) I really have not found one worth “bad mouthing”. I have liked some much better than others but to bad mouth is really not ethical. I heard Zig Ziglar say one time, “Whenever you start throwing dirt, all you are really doing is losing ground”. Bad mouthing manufactures or competition benefits no one.
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Respectfully, from a consumer point of view: if the pejorative connotations of “badmouthing” also means an absence of forthright criticism from those best placed to inform, then I would suggest that benefit does accrue to many at the expense of those kept in the dark.
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And once the companies that make our aids are smashed and broken who is going to make them?
So we’re back to “creative destruction”. Funny, you don’t hear that term so much anymore.
Those who call on in house HA providers to ‘cut their costs’ are really calling for pay cuts to audiologists and employees. Who will becomes an audiologist when their income is peanuts? And anyway, why not call for rent control? In any case, "creative destruction/’ is a term usually used by those who see a chance to grab market share without really caring who gets hurt in the process.
There are many elderly people coming in to the hearing aid center I buy from. They wander in with issues with their aids that can often be fixed at the front desk. I myself need cleanings more frequently than most. Just today I lost a dome in my ear canatl (!!!) and was able to walk in and have it extracted by this same shop.
All that may go by the wayside soon enough. All of us will join the elderly by the wayside soon enough.
For many years, most of the “smashing” has come in the form of consolidation… more and more brands are just that: re-branded versions of just a few devices actually made by a couple of conglomerates. All of the problems with monoculture in other contexts apply here (not just in terms of anti-trust, but also because a lack of diversity in products is not good for people who need to use them, either).
In many industries the same thing has happened over the past few decades. The problem isn’t that smaller companies can’t make money, but that they can’t make more and more money as fast as investors demand - and the bigger fish need to eat (“smash”) the small ones to capture market share themselves to obtain that kind of growth.
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Are we still going to need hearing aids? Someone’s going to make them. Probably one of the company’s that’s making them now. One of the consumer electronic companies they’re busy gobbling up will probably make the otc devices. Win, win.
How’s the weather up in Stockholm?
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I think @greg.smith’s post touches on a couple of salient points that reflect what’s been going wrong with our economic mindset for a long time. The post alludes to the reality that companies’ missions are no longer customer-centric and consumer service orientated. They are investor-centric and profit-orientated.
Don’t get me wrong: I know that companies have to turn a profit. It’s when those profits end up defining the companies’ focus of activity that their raison d’être drifts from what benefits their customers in particular, and their industry, in general. It’s then that oligopolies are seen by dominant industry players (like the Big6) as meritorious because of their enhanced ability to generate profits, rather than as the incestuous and obscene subcultures that they are.
Make no mistake: the purpose of the hearing device subculture is to service the profit motives of the priestly class, rather than the performance needs of supplicants. (We - end users and HCPs, alike - are called upon to regularly, and without resistance, pay their tithes in the form of bloated prices for products whose obsolescence is choreographed by the makers, cloaked in the “marketing speak” of “technological advancements” whose real benefit to the user are described as “incremental progress”.
Many of the behaviours of the dominant force in the HA industry (the Makers) about which we complain are, in fact, those of a priesthood of closely-held companies that have no qualms about making the distributors and users of their products pay top dollar for top quality, while offering little transparency or objective information that would empower their clients to truly understand why a pair of devices is priced at $7,500 (what the Makers claim is their fair market value), as compared to the $350->$500 these same devices cost to produce. Buyers are asked, like members being initiated into some cult, to take it (largely on faith) that the [price - cost] differential is due to “Holy Mystery of the Brand X Automatic Suppressor/Optimizer”. If the individual charges and fees that drive “bundled pricing” up to stratospheric levels are legitimate, why not just be up front about it and itemize them, rather than playing a shell game with the end user?
[Even less comprehensible are the ethics that allow makers to withhold value from those who are unable to pay the premium they demand for access to their “Tier1” features. Tier1 is simply the term for “fully-functioning”. The other “Tiers” are simply marketing terms for “intentionally broken by the manufacturer, to a greater or lesser degree”. My opinion is that the basic model hearing aid should be offered as the core product. The “core product” should be capable of serving the day-to-day needs of the average customer, and should not be just the minimally functional form of the hearing aid device being taken to market. This core product should be offered at a basic price, along with “Add+” window panes, per Apple’s purchase checkout model, that clearly state what each added function does, and what it costs. It would then be easier for purchasers to comprehend how a hearing device “starting at $x” ends up costing them ($x+$1,500) at the checkout window.]
Not long ago, the world and its communication channels weren’t so highly evolved, and the economic environment was conducive to the keeping of arcane “technological secrets”, the existence of which justified manufacturers’ magical claims about the efficacy of their wares. Today, however, we live in a different world: one in which devices that, heretofore, could legitimately bear the moniker of “medical devices”, but which are today, to a greater and greater extent, being exposed for what they are - generic electronic devices - most of whose “scientific and engineering features” can be understood and manipulated by anyone who has owned a high-end sound system, a home recording studio, or a killer guitar-player’s pedal board.
So, perhaps the OTC market will benefit the 80% of those who require relatively straightforward treatment of a hearing deficit, while there will still be the 20% whose impairments are beyond the layman’s ken, and which will require an audiologist’s training to address. However, it may also be true that hearing aids, as a class of device, now share lodgings with the pantheon of consumer electronic devices, where they (arguably) belong.
The question is: whom will we empower to draw the line between the 80, and the 20?
[ADDENDUM: I apologize for the multiple edits and also for the one that, unintentionally, transplanted part of @greg.smith’s post into the middle of my text. I find the Discourse software to be quite frustrating and user-unfriendly, betimes!]
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[ADDENDUM: I apologize for the multiple edits and also for the one that, unintentionally, transplanted part of @greg.smith’s post into the middle of my text!]
I’m quoting myself in a new post, here, to try to draw back some readers I may have lost when Greg’s text showed up in the middle of mine. I apologize that it takes me so many edits to get a piece right, but I find that the Discourse text editor is very hard-to-read and finicky sometimes - nothing to do with my advancing years!
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SpudGunner I found your post really helpful.
I learned a lot from it.
Thank you
DaveL
Toronto
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I am in the 20% that’s been referred to. Do I think aids are overpriced. Of course I do. Thank God I have insurance. At the same time that tiny little device opens a whole world to me that otherwise wouldn’t exist, at all. It’s because of that which makes the price a little easier to deal with. Even so every time I buy new aids I feel guilty thinking this money could be better spent elsewhere and I should just deal with my loss. I think everyone walks out of the building wearing new aids thinking they spent too much money
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No better place to spend bux. Without the aids, you would cut off people and experiences that just would not be possible. I think it is a quality of life issue. If the VA didn’t give mine, I would absolutely pay for them…happily…Nothing better than hearing the soft voices of the grand children…
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Nobody disputes the benefits received from wearing aids. What is being questioned is whether those that need them are being taken advantage of
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I really don’t know the answer to
that. Probably. It is one thing that I would like about Social Medicine…I believe folks have the absolute right to be able to hear!..WTG British commonwealth!
@danhuddleston: Don’t cheer the Commonwealth too loudly. We don’t have socialized hearing or vision care in Canada, not to mention dental!
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Whoops!..My bad! I thought all the commonwealth countries had good social medical. I stand corrected…Mea maxima culpa!
Dan
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(and the “post must be at least 30 characters…” 
)
I mean, I was taken for emergency surgery a few years back by ambulance, transferred between hospitals, seen by 4 paramedics, five doctors and countless nurses, kept in the hospital for 4 days, and I only had to pay $45 to supplement the first ambulence ride. So Canada is decent. But yeah, we have a ways to go on vision, hearing and dental.
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I agree @Neville. Was not meaning to denigrate Canada (after all, I wore the uniform). But we make people poor who don’t have insurance for vision, dental, and hearing.
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