Joyce Shen was devastated when doctors said her firstborn, Emory, hadn’t passed her newborn hearing screening. Emory was diagnosed with profound sensorineural hearing loss in both ears as an infant, meaning sounds are extremely muffled.
But Shen and her husband, who live in Ontario, California, faced a horrible situation. Without intervention, they were told, their baby daughter’s hearing impairment would prevent her from acquiring age-appropriate language skills and likely leave her with developmental problems affecting her education.
Pediatric hearing aids can look like modified earbuds and sometimes come in pink, blue, and other bright colors. The ones Emory needed can cost more than $6,000 a pair, and she would require a new pair about every three years as her ears grow. But the family’s work-based insurance does not cover those costs.
Shen said she knows all too well what’s at stake for her daughter, who was born in February 2023. “If she had hearing aids, I could start all the speech therapy right now, get her access to most of the sounds. But right now, I can’t do anything. Just waiting.”
The family is not alone in this predicament. California and 17 other states don’t require private insurance plans to cover hearing aids for kids, so many don’t. But about two or three of every 1,000 babies in the U.S. are born with detectable hearing loss in one or both ears, according to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
“You have to learn to hear before you can learn to speak, and we all speak how we hear,” said Brooke Phillips, a Los Angeles audiologist who co-chairs the volunteer coalition Let California Kids Hear.
Grassroots action, often led by mothers, helped steer legislatures in 32 states to pass bills that would require private insurance to cover hearing aids for children. Vermont, Virginia, and Washington are the most recent.
The fix, however, is not always an easy one. Bills died at the end of the most recent legislative sessions in New York and Hawaii. And, in California, where only 9% of children and young adults enrolled in commercial plans have coverage for hearing aids and services, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a measure in October that would have required such coverage.
“There’s real disappointment among professionals and our California families,” said Phillips.
Newsom, who, by the end of 2023, faced a projected $68 billion state budget deficit, explained in his veto letter that the bill would “increase ongoing state General Fund costs” and “set a new precedent by adding requirements that exceed the [state’s] benchmark plan” under the Affordable Care Act. Adding kids’ hearing aids to the essential benefits package would trigger a provision of the ACA that requires state coffers to offset the additional expense. Newsom was wary that this “could open the state to millions to billions of dollars in new costs” for expanded coverage.
Nationally, there’s pressure to pass such state mandates because health plans often don’t cover hearing aids for kids, calling them elective or cosmetic. Dylan Chan, a pediatric ear, nose, and throat physician at the University of California-San Francisco Benioff Children’s Hospitals, said hearing aids should be covered the way glasses and tooth fillings are.
2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Citation:
Insurance doesn’t always cover hearing aids for kids (2024, January 24)
retrieved 24 January 2024
from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-doesnt-aids-kids.html
This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.
