My opinion:
do those things have to cost thousands of dollars?
--yes and no, costs could come down, but in the lifetime of a hearing aid it could be replaced 3 times or more at no charge to the user.
What are the primary cost components?
The primary components are:
Microphone {cheap to produce}
Receiver (speaker) {cheap to produce}
Processing Chip {expensive to R&D, cheap to produce}
Are the people doing these jobs highly paid?
Salary in Canada was between $60,000 (diploma) - $100,000 (Doctorate) when I left the industry.
Are they highly paid because of high costs of college tuition?
Depends, but after leaving for IT and making more than that with less education - I am unsure if they are "highly paid"
Would free college help lower their costs?
I would hope so, but doubt the savings would pass on to the consumer.
Maybe cheap to produce in larger sizes. As you have to make the components smaller and smaller to fit all the extra gubbins, each of those other components now become exponentially more expensive to design and produce.
Yes, there’s a lot of overcharging in this business, because the manufacturers charge what the market will bear, and because of insurance and lack of competition due to all the regulations they have to comply with, the market can bear a very high price.
But it’s still a very hard problem, and there’s a very significant component of user training over the long term that is required. When you were a newborn, you didn’t learn to hear and speak your native language in a single day, you didn’t learn to see and recognize faces and read written words in a single day. You shouldn’t expect a hearing aid to magically fix you in a single day — your brain needs time to retrain.
What are the primary cost components? The primary components are: Microphone {cheap to produce} Receiver (speaker) {cheap to produce} Processing Chip {expensive to R&D, cheap to produce}
Are the people doing these jobs highly paid? Salary in Canada was between $60,000 (diploma) - $100,000 (Doctorate) when I left the industry.
Are they highly paid because of high costs of college tuition? Depends, but after leaving for IT and making more than that with less education - I am unsure if they are "highly paid"
Would free college help lower their costs? I would hope so, but doubt the savings would pass on to the consumer.