There sure seems to be a monopoly of sorts in the hearing aid market, as you say the hearing aids themselves are expensive some up to $12,000, and take it from someone who's tried them, they are nothing special, in fact the first time I tried a hearing aid I was dumbfounded at just how tacky the replication of sound really is, they are like listening to the footy on a 1980's transistor radio.
After getting my hearing aids fine tuned at least 5 times and still being far from content to use them at all, eventually out of curiosity some time ago I asked my audiologist just how much the machine is that she uses to program/fine tune the hearing aids, "$40,000" she said, my reply was "gee's I guess that rules out me getting one and playing around with it to fine tune my own hearing aids", "yeah" she laughed. I went home and put my $10K hearing aids on my desk and they have sat there for the last year, absolutely useless.
Anyway just consider a device like the IQbuds that are 30 times cheaper than crappy(I'm in fact referring to top of the line) hearing aids that you can fine tune yourself with an app on your phone that comes free with the IQbuds. Seems to me a game changer(and that's just one use for them), and those ridiculous profits that hearing aid manufacturers have been robbing hearing impaired people of is soon to become a distant memory.
Still waiting for my IQbuds, but I sure hope they are at least as good as my hearing aids and then the next stop for me is ebay, where I'll be trying to flog them before word gets out about the IQbuds. Then I'll back the truck up on NUH and give my feedback on these forums. Knowing how crap my hearing aids are I think the IQbuds have a good chance of coming pretty close them (and maybe even outperform them) if the reviews/coverage they've had thus far is anything to go on.
Bring it on I say, and I'll be one happy half deaf NUH shareholder
(20min delay)