This is unfortunately quite true. My wife is hard of hearing. Thankfully, the devices are covered by insurance, but that is arguably part of the problem as it j

This is unfortunately quite true. My wife is hard of hearing. Thankfully, the devices are covered by insurance, but that is arguably part of the problem as it just subsidizes extortionary pricing. We're talking near ten grand for something that is technically impressive, but not any more than normal ANC headphones, and they haven't improved much while all other audio processing devices continue getting better. And insurance didn't cover it until a little over a decade ago, leaving her functionally deaf for most of her life when she didn't need to be. This kind of thing has a serious chilling effect on people, too. I can see it in the way I entered the software industry and decided to become an engineer after leaving the Army. I skyrocketed past her within a few years to the point I'm earning more than double what she does now and she's been doing it for 20 years. I puzzled for years over why she seems to so consistently get ignored and doesn't advocate for herself until I realized the obvious reason. She's been sitting in meetings and having face-to-faces with people for decades in which she couldn't hear what they were saying and she learned to just stay quiet and nod along, so no one has ever noticed her. It's a lifelong habit now leading to self-doubt, low self-esteem, peers thinking you're stuck up or unfriendly or even stupid. None of it had to be that way.