Buyer BEWARE!!! True price gouging at HearX.
I am in the medical profession for over 20 years now and never knew how unregulated and somewhat unscrupulous the hearing aid Business can be until I started to need hearing aids 5 years ago. It really puts the whole hearing aid industry and business to shame. It really is worse that the diamond and gold districts and especially worse that the optometry business.
My insurance covers $5000 for a set of hearing aids, but my company only allows me to go to HearUSA or HearX because of some kind of arrangement. Well I am young and very active and very busy and my hearing/listening is critical for my work. So I wanted the better / best hearing aid tech currently available. HearUSA absolutely insists on charging me and my insurance $8,200 (not including the accessories) for the HA I picked out. This is insane because the cost of these HAs to the audiologist is about $2000. I went online and found the exact same HA for $3000 WITH 3 accessories that HearX wanted to charge me an additional $800. So my out of pocket cost would be $9000 - $5000 insurance = $4000 when I could just order on line from MULTIPLE different vendors for $3000 (including 3 years of warrantee, service, batteries, loss, repairs, and ALL the accessories). This makes no sense, but it is what HearUSA can do. There was no negotiations because they have a virtual monopoly with my insurance company. Pure price gouging the consumer.
I even went 2 blocks down to another audiologist and they quoted me $6800 for the exact same hearing aids including full service for 2 years.
I am relatively young and low maintenance (despite having 3 sets of hearing aids in 5 years, I have only needed to see the audiologist 10 times total). I know that the HA audiology dispensary offices need to make up their costs in time of multiple visits/adjustments by charging more, but the price gouging by this place is insane = 5x markup?
The customer service is ok and the receptionist is nice and responsive. read more