Hearing Economics

Today’s post comes from Guest Editor Harvey Abrams, PhD,  back with another compelling read.  He was last heard explaining away the $100 hearing aid myth.  Readers can find his bio at the end of the post. Today’s post picks up the Pricing issue from the service side of the equation:  Not only do products cost more than you’d think, but services

“The success of the final product of services and hearing aid is dependent much more upon our services than it is upon the product. ”  Catherine Palmer PhD  Audiologists and licensed practitioners believe those words, based on years of experience with patients.  That’s why most of us do what we do and charge what we charge.  The next step in

“We don’t treat the product as a commodity other than the fact that the acquisition cost of the product is a line item.”  Catherine Palmer PhD  online pharmacy buy cenforce with best prices today in the USA Last week took issues with unmarked black boxes and the misuse of “markup” with reference to hearing aid sales. Today’s post continues the

Last week’s post concluded that hearing aid markup is “roughly keystone: 2x, not the ‘exorbitant’ 5x or even higher markup claimed on the Internet.”  The conclusion was based on supporting, albeit sparse, data, which is more than can be said for the 5x claim reproduced in Figure 1.  Besides, talking about markup as a multiple is misleading and sloppy when speaking of complex

The last few posts in the Pricing series measured the spans separating wholesale and retail pricing of hearing aids.  The purpose was not to give away trade secrets; rather to reduce trade secrecy in order to pursue rational explanations of hearing aid pricing.   For that, we need real data rather than shrouded speculation, which means “transparent” pricing, or what

Last week’s post raised the curtain on average wholesale and retail hearing aid pricing with the data in Figure 1, but it did not address average retail price of premium instruments.  That’s a crucial part of the Price puzzle because that’s where most of the wholesale increase is occurring.  Two big questions were left unanswered: How much of the higher

Are hearing aid markups as high as internet operators and others claim?  Are Audiologists routinely using a “5x markup?”  So ended the last post in this series and so begins today’s post.   How High Did You Say? Based on the 89,400 results accrued from a simple Google search of “$6000 hearing aids,”  it seems reasonable to use the decade-old anchor price of

Let’s launch the New Year with an exciting list of new patent approvals, in the tradition of previous posts, continuing the momentum started by E.G. Hyde in 1855 with the first US hearing aid patent (#12,951 shown above). If “exciting” doesn’t sound like  the right word, how about “contentious” or at least  “competitive”?  The numbers tell the story of the

This post is a Reader’s Choice selection for 2013.   GN Resound stole the show at the 58th Congress of Hearing Aid Acousticians (EUHA) in Germany last week, with the debut of its “Made for iPhone” MFi hearing aid (scheduled for global release 1st quarter of 2014).  According to a press release covered by the Wall Street Journal and internationally on Oct 16, the LiNX(TM) MFi

Dear Readers: Happy New Year 2014. During this holiday season, the editors at Hearing Health & Technology Matters (HHTM) are taking some time off. However, we are not leaving you without anything to read on our blog this week. Instead, we are publishing a special holiday edition filled with what we call our Readers’ Choices. The Readers’ Choices are the