This week, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren celebrated a major victory after passing her bill that will allow hearing aids to be purchased over the counter, effectively reducing their cost and increasing their availability.
Forty-eight million people in America suffer from hearing loss and out of those people, only one in six are able to afford a hearing aid. This bill will drastically change those numbers.
The bipartisan bill, co-written by conservative Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, was attached to the FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017 and now only awaits the signature of President Trump to be enacted.
Sen. Warren joined Boston Public Radio to discuss this new legislation and the importance of decreasing the cost of hearing aids.
“You have people who are just trapped in silence,” Sen. Warren said. "Not only can they not hear the TV, they don’t get to talk to their husband or wife, they don’t get to go out to the grocery store, they are worried about driving, worried they aren’t going to be able to hear.”
Warren pointed out that hearing aids are not covered by Medicaid, Medicare and many insurance policies. On average, a single hearing aid costs a few thousand dollars and that is after you have already paid to see a hearing specialist. By making hearing aids available over the counter and reducing some of the state level restrictive entanglements of the hearing aid industry, this new bill will greatly reduce the cost of these devices.
“Now the estimate is that we are going to bring the over-the-counter cost of a hearing aid down to a few hundred bucks,” Warren said.
While the bill received little opposition, the one group that resisted the bill from the beginning was the hearing aid industry itself. They went as far as airing attack ads against the Republicans who supported the bill. These ads were not enough to waver their support, and in a seemingly rare instance of bipartisanship, Republicans stood by Warren and her bill.
“The Republicans who were on the bill stood strong,” Warren said.
