Hearing aids tend to be classified as DME (durable medical equipment). Medical equipment has a higher support cost...

My father gets free batteries for life with purchase which is part of the cost. Apparently since his ears had failed to deliver any input to his brain (on SOME but not all wavelengths,) his brain lost patience waiting for the dead frequency info and those brain cells were reassigned. When he got the fancy hearing aids they tested his hearing very carefully and created a map of what he could and could not hear and the hearing aids only amplify those sounds which he struggles with. Shocking!! After years signals started flooding into the brain, the prodigal sound returns! It takes weeks for the brain to retrain itself to process audio info again so every few weeks he has to go in and have his hearing remapped and the EQ adjusted to match his actual hearing which is a big part of the cost, these are far far from plug and play. Lots of tweaking involved which gets steep. Oh but you should have seen the dazzled wide-eyed look he had walking away from the doctors office..."I CAN HEAR HER FLIP-FLOPS!!" and all sorts of such revelations. Also he has some robocop type powers now. He can select directional mic input where he hears what he looks at or even a mic that only hears signals from behind him. As a music lover he is happy as a fly in a pile of poo about these things.