Last week I posted about our plans to move to Seattle in September. Two days after I wrote that, Miles came home from camp with a broken hearing aid. He’s needed new ones for over a year, with more advanced technology that will help him hear better, and we’d been saving up, but we were nowhere close to the $7,000 needed. Nevertheless, he needs them now, and so we’re having to pay for them now, using money we don’t have.
For now, plans to move have been scrapped until after the snow melts, or we recover financially, whichever comes first. I’m hoping that will be early next year. I hope we can fill a van in January and throw on some snow chains and craaaaawl our way over the pass to everyone.
I wouldn’t usually talk about finances publicly, except I want to highlight what a lot of people don’t realize:
Hearing aids and audiology appointments are not usually covered by insurance.
This means that if you see a kid with hearing aids, it’s very likely that his/her parents paid anywhere from 1k-4k, out of pocket, for each one. And that probably isn’t their first pair, and it definitely won’t be their last.
Think for a minute about the very busy life of a toddler or grade-schooler. Think about sticking $2,000 into each your kids’ ears and hoping they don’t lose one, drop one while showing it to a friend, jump into a pool without taking them out, leave them in a pocket so they get run through the washer and dryer (this happened to me once -it was my fault, not Miles’s – and it’s the only time I’ve ever wept while standing in a laundry room), get hit in the head with something, stand out in the rain, or take one off in a public restroom because the toilets flushing are so loud it gives them a headache, and then an aid gets flushed.
Home insurance doesn’t cover damage from loss or wear and tear. When I called my insurance company, I was told I could make a claim only if the hearing aid had been broken as a result of Miles being struck by lightning, bathed in hot lava, or if a hearing aid fell “out of his ear and then was run over by a car”. There are companies that will insure hearing aids, but that’s going to cost around $15-25 a month. We’ll be getting one of those policies for his new pair. We are fortunate enough that we can afford that, but how many other families can afford a seven thousand dollar pair of hearing aids, and then another twenty bucks a month to insure them?
I realize a lot of people are talking about healthcare reform right now, and this is something that should be on the table. Children who are hard of hearing who don’t have access to hearing aids are severely handicapped in acquiring spoken language skills.
Without hearing aids Miles would need to rely almost entirely on lip-reading and ASL (American Sign Language). While ASL is a beautiful and complete language all its own (I once studied to be an interpreter and can say from experience it’s an incredible language), it’s not something most people know, and if that’s your only language, you’re more limited than someone who can also speak and hear spoken English.
Without hearing aids, Miles would be unable to speak clearly or be understood by anyone but his immediate family (you can’t repeat sounds you can’t hear), and he’d need to be in a private school for deaf kids. With hearing aids, Miles can lip-read perfectly, and he has access to the deaf community, but he can also speak clearly enough to be understood by people who have just met him, he can function happily in a regular 1st grade classroom, and his speech pathology sessions are useful because he can hear what his pathologist is saying to him.
In short, hearing aids have enabled my son’s speech and language to develop at a pace close enough his peer group that he can function almost normally among them, and because of this early intervention, the impact of his hearing loss on his life has been profoundly mitigated.
Keep all this in mind, the next time you’re discussing healthcare reform.
Amen!
Absolutely. Undercoverage is as much or more of a problem as “lack of coverage”. Too many people assume that people are talking about having NO insurance, and dude, why don’t you just get some? Well, some people can’t get it, and others can’t get insurance to cover things that they really need to have covered.
Barring that, the costs of health care need to be forced down to a reasonable level. Don’t know how to do either, though.
Good luck with the hearing aids. My mother has flushed at least one, and I think two, of hers.
(psst…”severely” has a typo…)
Thanks! I fixed it.
Ugh, that’s got to be tough on the kidlet. I had contact lenses at seven (for medical reasons, not vanity) and the pressure to not lose or break was impossible. And my contacts were only $100 or so apiece … $2k is just inconceivable. How do you impress upon him how important it is to be careful without making him neurotic? /wince
Sorry to hear the move is on hold. May the financial recovery be swift.
I work really hard at not giving the kids complexes about things, especially money-related. So he understands they’re important and NOT TO GET THEM WET, but otherwise we just teach him how delicate they are, and how if he needs to take them off, he has to hand them to a teacher or other adult. So far, that’s worked really well. He’s had a surprising dearth of mishaps.
Now that he’s about to turn 7, I think we’ll have another talk about them, and go over in more detail what they cost and how important it is that we take good care of them. I’m sure the cracking wasn’t his fault. I think the casing was just getting old.
That sounds very balanced of you.
I’m not sure I could be so calm.
Did you see this article? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/health/25patient.html
No, I hadn’t read that, thanks! What a great article. I was happy to look up our audiologist and see that she gets great reviews.
It is so great to read a post discussing the absolute need for insurance to cover hearing aids and visits to the audiologist. It is crazy to me that these are not covered. I write a blog about hearing aids and this is the primary topic I seem to always get back to. Hearing aids are very expensive, millions of people need them yet most can’t afford them since insurance does not help. Very frustrating. Great post!