If you or a loved one has trouble hearing, listen up. Hearing aids can make a big difference. The problem is they are pricey, costing from €1,000 to €6,000 a pair. There are grants, tax back, warranties and insurance issues to navigate too.
The right hearing aids will vastly improve your life, so do your homework to save money and get it right.
Some 300,000 adults in Ireland have hearing loss that requires intervention, according to HSE figures. Most people start to lose a small amount of their hearing from the age of 40. If you’ve started watching telly with the subtitles on, that might be you.
Not being able to hear what’s going on can affect your functioning and employment prospects. A survey by national charity for deafness and hearing loss, Chime, found that 37 per cent of people in their fifties noticed a deterioration in their hearing. By the age of 80, most of us will have significant hearing problems.
Ignore hearing loss and you are at greater risk of social isolation, depression and cognitive decline. So, expensive though they are, the right hearing aids are a sound investment.
Hearing care is a good investment for governments too. An annual additional investment of $1.40 per person is needed to scale up hearing care globally, according to a WHO report published this year. Over a 10-year period, it said, this would return nearly $16 per person in savings.
Why then does Ireland have such a high level of unaddressed hearing loss compared to other developed countries, asks Chime. Despite their health and economic benefits, we have been prescribing hearing aids at less than half the rate of the UK per head of population, the charity says.
Is there a grant for that?
In the UK, the vast majority of those who need a hearing aid can get one for free under the NHS. Only medical card holders and children get them free here. That accounts for just 20 per cent of hearing aid provision in this State, says Chime.
Medical card holders were twice as likely to have hearing aids as those who didn’t have a medical card, according to 2017 figures from Tilda, the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing. This would seem to indicate that cost is a factor preventing many people from addressing their hearing loss.
If you don’t have a medical card, you may qualify for the Treatment Benefit Scheme. This is available to workers (both employees and self-employed) and retired people who have enough social insurance (PRSI) contributions.
The grant covers a maximum of €500 towards the cost of each hearing aid, and one repair per aid in a four-year period, up to a maximum of €100 per aid. The scheme was launched in May 2021 and, by the end of 2022, about 1,000 more people a month were getting hearing aids, according to Chime figures.
The number of social insurance contributions you need to qualify for the scheme depends on your age. If you have a MyGov ID account, you can check your contributions on MyWelfare.ie. If you don’t have a MyGovID account, you can set one up on that site too.
If you don’t want to do that, you can check your contributions by phoning the PRSI Records section of the Department of Social Protection. An audiologist or hearing aid provider can help you check this too.
If you don’t have enough PRSI contributions of your own, you may be able to qualify using the PRSI record of your spouse, civil partner or cohabitant. Those who have worked in the UK and elsewhere in the EU may qualify too. You should check your eligibility for the Treatment Benefit Scheme before buying hearing aids.
You’ll hear plenty of ads from high street providers offering “free hearing aids with PRSI”. Yes, they are free if you buy a €1,000 model. But these may or may not have the features that will make the difference you need.
“The basic models are better than nothing and they are quite good for people living alone, but if you go to meetings, are on committees, are in the workplace or are going to the pub, those hearing aids may not give you the benefit you should be getting,” says advocacy, research and public affairs director of Chime, Brendan Lennon.
You can put the grant towards a more expensive pair if that’s what you need, paying the balance yourself.
Check the warranty too. You are eligible for the Government grant only every four years, so if a hearing aid claps out after its two-year warranty expires, you’ll have to stump up the cash yourself to replace it.
“You should look for a four-year minimum warranty, except with the basic models. With anything else, you should be looking for a four-year warranty,” says Lennon.
Shop around
With any big purchase, the advice is to shop around, perhaps trying a high street provider as well as an independent or family run shop. You may have to return multiple times for fittings, and again in five or six years time for a new pair, so ideally you want a provider who is invested in building a long-term relationship with you rather than someone whose horizon is a weekly sales commission.
“Word of mouth is key and shop around. Go to at least two providers,” says Lennon.
Chime sells hearing aids as a social enterprise, ranging from €999 to €2,750 for a mid-range pair right up to €4,230 for the bells and whistles, says Lennon.
Hearing aids may require some fine tuning to start, so choosing a provider close to home will help.
Claiming the cost
Hearing aids qualify as a medical device for tax purposes. If you are paying for them yourself, tax relief is granted by way of a refund at a rate of 20 per cent of the cost. So for a hearing aid costing €2,800, you’ll get about €560 back.
To benefit, you must have paid tax in the relevant year. Health expenses are claimed through your income tax return. If you are a PAYE taxpayer, you have the option to claim relief in real time during the year. You can do this using Revenue’s MyAccount service and get the relief in about five working days.
You can claim relief on the last four year’s health expenses so, if you bought your hearing aids in that window, you can claim retrospectively. You don’t have to submit the receipt to make a claim, but you should keep it on file for six years in case your claim is selected by Revenue for checking.
Health insurance
Generally, hearing aids are not covered by your health insurance policy but it is still worth giving your health insurer a call to check.
Sometimes insurance companies may offer an optional hearing plan add-on that includes hearing aid coverage. If they do, ask what’s covered, if it is limited to specific hearing aid models or hearing care providers, and if you will have to pay the full amount for the hearing aids before getting a reimbursement.
If you have private health insurance cover, you can still claim tax relief on the portion of the cost not covered by your insurer.
Insurance cover
Hearing aids are easy to lose.. If you’ve bought a pair, notify your house insurance provider. You may have to specify them as items in your household contents for them to be covered. Ask your insurer whether they are covered outside the home too.
“For an extra charge, customers of 123.ie, for example, can specify hearing aids as “all risk items” on their home insurance policy. This gives full cover for loss or damage inside and outside the home, says the insurer.
If they are not specified as “all risk” items, hearing aids are still covered within the home as contents. That means they would be covered if stolen from the home or in the event of a fire for example, but not for accidental damage or accidental loss.
“We would recommend you getting them covered because they are expensive items,” says Lennon of Chime. “Pets eat hearing aids believe it or not. I’m not making that up.” That could be €6,000 gone to the dogs.
You can contact us at OnTheMoney@irishtimes.com with personal finance questions you would like to see us address. If you missed last week’s newsletter, you can read it here.
