High Hearing Aid Prices Can Hurt

I love being a part of the hearing aid business.  Particularly as a part of UBHearing.  I love that we help people to hear.

Every now and again a viral video will make the rounds on social media showing something profound - like people who have never heard before hearing for the first time thanks to the technology available via cochlear implants.  What we do is not so dramatic.  But we know the dramatic impact of doing nothing.

In the past, working for mainstream hearing aid retailers, I've seen more than half of those who need hearing aids walk out empty-handed.  The price is just beyond their ability to justify.  Especially once retired, and on a fixed income.  Especially when, as first-time buyers , people realize that they'll need to replace their hearing aid, on average, every five years.  At sixty-five, nobody wants to spend thousands of dollars that they'll have to spend again at seventy, seventy five, eighty, and beyond.  So they put it off.  It may have happened to you.

At seventy, however, if you've been managing without hearing aids, the decision is put it off again.  And again, and again, and again.  Subtly, over time, people around you have learned to speak louder - or speak less.  You have likely become more and more isolated, perhaps without being aware of it.

Once you've reached your eighties and beyond, we see many adult children of hard-of-hearing parents, coming to a hearing clinic because mom or dad is in dire straits.  They've become unwell.  They may be transitioning to a long-term care facility.  They can't hear at doctor's appointments and can't participate in decisions being made on their behalf.  Finally, cost is not the issue.  Quality of life is more important.

However, at this point, it can often be too late. 

First, there’s the issue of fiddling with a teensy-tiny computer, which is what a hearing aid is.  If you had been using hearing aids since your sixties or seventies, you'd be comfortably adept at managing changing batteries and wax guards, putting them in each morning and taking them out each evening, doing the small, daily maintenance required.  But, at this late stage of the game, with advanced dexterity or vision challenges, it's biting off more than you can chew.  Hearing aids are dropped, crushed, and lost with greater frequency for people who are new users at this late stage of the game.

The second rude awakening is that the world is shockingly noisy.  Even the things that aren't noise.  The sound of your furnace coming on.  The creak of your floorboards.  Just hearing as well as a normal person can be overwhelming for someone who hasn’t heard well for decades.  Once you’ve reached a certain point, many cannot tolerate the noise.  Period.  You need to turn your hearing aid down so low, to be able to stand it, that there’s little point in wearing a hearing aid at all.

Worst of all, for many, all those years of struggling with hearing loss, retreating from conversation and social events, has contributed to hearing distortion or an irretrievable loss of ability to process speech.  What your ears might gain from wearing hearing aids at this point, your brain may have lost.

Knowing how common a story this is for many, we opened UBHearing, to do what we can to make it possible for people to say "Yes", to hearing aids sooner.  

That is why our prices are consistently significantly lower than anywhere else in Canada, without sacrificing any quality and while also outshining our competition in employing best-practice fitting standards.  Technology constantly evolves, and UBHearing evolves with it, never resting on what we learned in the past, but always growing as new information becomes available, and testing and proving the merits of every claim that comes our way.
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We hope you’ll come and test our claims, and let us prove to you that you don’t have to wait until it’s too late.  Hearing aids can be affordable and effective.  That’s the UBHearing difference.