An audiology clinic in St. Paul says a recent change to state law helped a lot of patients in the year-and-a-half since its passage.

For years before that, insurance companies were required to cover hearing aids for children, but adults were left to pay thousands of dollars out-of-pocket to improve their hearing loss.

That changed on July 1, 2023, when state law was updated to require insurance plans to cover hearing aids regardless of a patient’s age.

Alicea Snow is one of those patients. For more than 30 years, the world through her ears was muffled.

“I have dealt with hearing loss since I can remember. I always had to be put in front of the class,” she shared after her latest appointment at Associated Hearing Care.

“Part of my coping was reading lips while I’m actually listening,” said Snow.

Coping got harder with age, though, and the hearing loss began to impact her at work.

“And one of my friends was like, ‘Why do you always yell when you talk? I’m right here.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t hear myself,'” Snow said.

She got tested for the first time in her early thirties and was surprised to learn the health insurance plan she has through her job would cut the cost significantly.

Once the hearing aids went in, a whole new world opened up, she said.

“The biggest difference was definitely being able to hear myself, hearing people, not straining to hear people all the time or asking them to repeat themselves 100 times,” Snow said.

“Like those memes that you see on Instagram — when they’re like, ‘when your friends are talking and you’ve said “Huh” for the fifth time, and then you just smile and wave because you’re, like, done trying to understand what they’re saying,'” she described. “So yeah, that’s where I was, and I’m not there anymore.”

Since the newer state mandate took effect last summer, Associated Hearing Care has seen a 54% increase in adults under 60 coming in for hearing aids, said Dr. Rebecca Younk, an audiologist at the St. Paul clinic.

The statistic surprised her a bit.

“When I ran the numbers, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ I knew I was seeing a lot more younger people, but 54% was extraordinary,” she said. “I mean, it was an enormous increase.”

It turns out that Snow was among many people who coped with hearing loss for years because the solution would cost thousands of dollars.

“We can get hearing aids covered for a few hundred dollars for them out-of-pocket now,” Dr. Younk said.

The state law change made them attainable, Snow said.

“If everything hadn’t have lined up the way it did, would I have gotten them? No,” she continued.

Removing the financial burden has also helped people whose hearing aids were covered by insurance as children but could no longer afford them out-of-pocket as adults, Younk added.

“They have young families of their own, and they’re trying to figure out, how do I pay for hearing aids and support my family? And so, those individuals are also benefiting.”

The year before the newer mandate in Minnesota, the FDA established a new category of hearing aids that could be bought over-the-counter the year prior. That was also a move aimed at making them more accessible to adults with mild to moderate hearing loss.

“We’re hearing larger messages out there saying, hearing is important to your overall health and to treat that hearing is important to keep you active and to keep you integrated with community,” Younk said.

All group health insurers in Minnesota fall under the requirement for hearing aid coverage, according to the Minnesota Department of Human Services.

However, it does not affect self-insured plans, insurers in other states, or federal plans like Medicare.

It also does not require coverage for over-the-counter hearing aids.