My Phonak M90 purchase from eBay

It requires $3,000 per ear to be covered by private health insurance. There are some exemptions for organizations that are self-insured, though.

https://states.aarp.org/maine/hearing-aid-coverage-for-mainers2

https://legislature.maine.gov/legis/bills/bills_129th/billtexts/HP003901.asp1

I wouldn’t mind being a provider in Maine right about now!

@hparsons Just to clarify a misconception (and granting that I haven’t been through the whole thread here)…Federal employees (a group to which I also belong) do not get 100% hearing aid insurance coverage on any plan I have looked into. All the plans available to me offer the same adults every 3 yrs @ $1250/ear with the subscriber paying the delta. Coverage for under 26 year old dependents is different though.

@shawn.garza said:

$3,000 per ear

I am trying to visualize how this works to me. My coverage is State Employee, Retired, from a mid-Atlantic state, now over-rode by Medicare (with ex-job secondary) but I have been in Maine for a decade. The insurance works ($60k of pee-trouble this year), but sometimes needs a push. There may be very few from my old state now in Maine. The insurer may not know of this mandate. (Yes, there is an office which reads all the news, but it doesn’t trickle-down to claims agents.)

@shawn.garza said:

I wouldn’t mind being a provider in Maine right about now!

It is very darn interesting. I wrote $1400 of my own money last week of 2019, and at that I may be one of the less-poor folks around. I could now self-justify two $2500 aids if I could afford it; this Mandate says I can.

However the AARP article is dated October. My AuD didn’t know this news? To suggest I wait a bit? He could have more than doubled his billing. Him and the other AuD in town should be outside the WalMart shilling for business. And it would help; there are a lot of HoH folks here.

Thanks again.

I know this is an older thread, but thought I’d follow up with what my experience has been.

First, my experiences with the M90’s I bought on eBay. I’ve been very satisfied with them. They were pretty much everything I wanted in a set of HAs. The app was slow to connect sometimes, and I’ve had a persistent problem with feedback on the left side (more on that in a bit), but overall I’ve been happy with them. Oh, I forgot, I very much DISLIKE the new wax guard system they have. I’ll touch on that in a bit too.

So now the overall experience of buying from eBay. I’m satisfied with what happened, and there were no major surprises. I got a set of state of the art HAs at a price I could afford. Yes, there were issues, and yes, I would have REALLY preferred to buy the normal way, but I got what I paid for, and was happy.

Probably the single biggest complaint I had was that the audiologist I used did not do remote sessions. I didn’t mind paying the fee for his services, but I hated taking half a day off work to do it, and the hassle of going out to his office. As I mentioned, I’ve had a persistent problem with feedback, and the cost and hassle led me to finally just accepting the issue, and working with them as best I could (turning them down they started feeding back).

There were other downsides, but I pretty much knew that was going to happen. I mentioned the feedback, and no remote sessions. Bummer. Also, I seem to be pretty clumsy with the newer Phonak “CeruShield”. I had trouble with them on both receivers, and had to have the audiologist pull them out. One couldn’t be fixed, so I had to buy a new receiver. Then about 7 or 8 months ago, one of the receivers broke as I was pulling it out of my ear. These things would have been covered had I bought a bundled package, but I still saved money over all. Plus, I simply did not have the money it would have taken at the time.

Then a couple of months ago, I ended up going underwater in the pool with my HAs in. 2 weeks later, the left one started giving me static. After a few days, it got so bad I quit wearing them. I understand this would have likely been covered had I purchased a bundled package. I took a chance, and missed out, some.

However, there’s a bright side for me. I work as a government contractor. That means that although I’m surrounded by workers that have government insurance plans, I (typically) do now. However, our contract was taken over by a Native Tribe owned company, and their employees get to participate in the Federal insurance program. (The fed insurance was mentioned a couple of times in this thread). What I didn’t know when I mentioned federal insurance programs earlier is that there are different policies (about 19 for my state), and they differ somewhat state to state. The new insurance I chose provides up to $2500 for hearing aids ($1250 per ear) once every five years. I was able to find a Phonak Audeo Paradise 90s for $1850 each, so I was able to trade up for a reasonable amount out of pocket. The company is in another state, but they remote support, and my fitting today went without a hitch.

Overall, I still feel the “eBay experience” was good for me. It gave me what I needed at the time at a price I could afford, and showed me the value of having a bundled package with an audiologist available as well.

Do you still have problems with feedback? They should be able to be solved with good fitting custom molds. The loss in the left ear especially would benefit from custom molds.

The new audiologist is going to try some settings first, but I’ve already considered I may have to go to custom molds.