When you live with hearing loss, it leads to social isolation and embarrassing situations, depression, and all the usual attendant disasters in people's lives.
The hearing cartel has used their wealth to create a pseudomedicine so as to brand their salespeople as doctors, and infested almost every state with bureacrats who determine policy and direct licensing and enforcement.
Hearing aids that are priced at $5000 or more are produced at scale for less than $5 per unit. It'd be trivial to turn most modern headphones into hearing aid equivalent technology, but there is a regulatory moat surrounding real time audio enhancement that will cause the fda to shut down any attempt to augment regular hearing, let alone allow the hearing impaired the ability to operate what amounts to a stereo equalizer.
The fda does engage in legitimate business, but that's insufficient to justify the costs paid by people who get screwed when the FDA is exploited for profit.
I currently pay for "hearing aids as a service" and lose $200 a month for the privilege of hearing. I pay what amounts to extortion money for my disability. Because my loss is classified profound, none of the Obama era loosening of hearing aid restrictions help. It's lip service that acknowledges the problem but leaves 95% of it unsolved.
Libertarian shmibertarian, I think I'm entitled to not get specially fucked because my ears don't work. I think it's sick that I feel grateful that I can afford hearing as a service when it should be something covered by insurance, or something I can buy for the same cost as premium earbuds.
Government shouldn't be involved in hearing aids, except in the consumer protection arena. The fda has no business enabling the exploitation of disabled and vulnerable people, but hearing aids are just one area they happily strong-arm the public on behalf of cartels and industry lobbies.
The FDA doesn't set prices. The cartels provide a product that works, which as far as the FDA is concerned, is all they care about. The FDA does not set prices.
As of 2017 there is already laws being changed to help lower prices and provide OTC hearing aids.
>Government shouldn't be involved in hearing aids, except in the consumer protection arena.
That is what they are involved with...
You seem to have demonized the FDA over one issue they don't really control and are now throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Or, as this guy[1] put it, like house cats. “convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don’t appreciate or understand.”
As a former Libertarian who luckily grew out of that phase, I love this analogy.
1: https://twitter.com/jspauldingphoto/status/14615069981183303...
One of the things I always liked about HN (even years ago HN) is that it seemed to feature a diversity of age ranges. Which brings some nice perspective.