Bluetooth hearing aid? Sweet! They really have come a long way, haven't they?
I'm happy and honored to pay taxes to support people like your hubby (and my dad, and my uncle, and Timothy and the other veterans and active duty people on these forums.) They've earned it! (A bit less happy about some of the other uses of my money, though. 
)
)
@Anonymous wrote:If this hearing damage was service connected-You/He deserves every penny of it-
Amen and Selah.
Starting Score: 469
@Anonymous wrote:This might sound a little cheesy, but I really feel the need to say THANK YOU to every person in here, and in the US at large, that pays taxes.Today, my husband was able to link up his hearing aid to his cell phone. This hearing aid is a $3000 piece of equipment that he received from the USN doctor a few weeks ago. I can only imagine what he would have paid for this if we were civilians, even if we had insurance. He most likely would have received a hearing aid that was whatever insurance would cover, if it would cover anything at all since he does have one ear that works..Now, with this hearing aid, he can still drive down the road and use his cell phone. Why? It has BlueTooth capabilities. With this hearing aid, he doesn't have to quickly pull the hearing aid out of his ear in order to answer the phone in time. (The other ear is totally and permanently deaf, so he has to answer with that ear). We went on a hike a few months ago, and there was a gorgeous creek on the right -- his deaf side. He didn't know there was a creek on that side, until we turned around on the trail and he could hear the babbling in his left ear. Now, taking that same hike, he can hear the creek from either direction. ((he might not know where the creek is, since the sound is transferred to his left ear, but hey, better than nothing!!)).It really means so much to him, and me, to have this device. And we didn't pay for it -- all of you did. I've been thinking about that all day, and just had to lay it out there.Thanks to everyone!
As other posters have said, if his hearing loss was connected in any way to his service then absolutely I am honored to have helped pay for his hearing aid. We as a nation owe it to the men and women in uniform to give them the best possible medical care. On Memorial Day as I do every year I visited two cemeteries with my wife and we noted how many of the gravestones mention service in some war. Since we live in Connecticut, there are MANY wars mentioned on gravestones, going back to Colonial wars before the American Revolution, though by far the most numerous wars we saw mentioned on gravestones were the Civil War and the First World War (since lots of vets from World War Two, including my father, are still alive). Unlike my father, both uncles, and both grandfathers I have never served in the US military (my dad was in the Navy, and the others in the Army). My Dad's father was a fireman; during World War Two he worked at the Manhattan Project nuclear research site in Hanford, Washington. It was of course a big secret what they did there, so the locals joked that it was a factory to make horses' front ends to be shipped to the District of Columbia to be assembled into complete horses since the Capital had a surplus of the other end
I have worn hearing aids since childhood, and they are not cheap. Very few insurance plans offer any coverage for hearing aids (and when they do, it's very limited). When I was young my parents paid for my hearing aids, and now I pay for them out of my own pocket. Fortunately my wife and I both earn pretty good salaries so the cost has not been a major problem for me, but I don't know how somebody of more modest means could possibly afford them.
@Nectarine wrote:
Indeed they have. The bluetooth feature is much more than just a convenience, it elegantly solves a major technical problem. Most hearing aids, including mine, have a gizmo called a "telephone coil" that picks up the magnetic field of a standard telephone. With a wired phone the T-coil has three benefits. First, in T-coil mode the microphone is disconnected so I hear only the phone. Second, the sound is cleaner with a direct electronic pickup. Third, cutting off the microphone eliminates the severe feedback that otherwise occurs when a phone handset is held close to the hearing aid.
However, most cell phones generate electronic interference that makes using the T-coil nearly impossible. My own solution is to use a wired headset so I can hold my cellphone far enough away from my head to prevent the T-coil from picking up the electronic noise, and put the earpiece of the headset close to one of my hearing aids so its T-coil can pick up the signal from the headset. This works reasonably well for me, but my NEXT hearing aids are gonna have Bluetooth, which should deliver cleaner sound with less fiddling AND let me hear through BOTH ears instead of just one.