Let’s see if the “fact-checkers” come for President Joe Biden over this one. On Tuesday, Biden announced that the U.S Food and Drug Administration had finalized a plan to sell hearing aids over the counter to those with slight or moderate hearing loss.
The plan is expected to save those needing the devices several thousand dollars.
“For millions of Americans, hearing aids and the doctor’s visit to get them prescribed are too expensive,” Biden said in a statement. “In the executive order I issued last year to increase competition in key industries and lower costs, I called on the FDA to finally make hearing aids available over the counter.”
“Today, the FDA is doing just that,” Biden continued. “As early as mid-October, Americans will be able to purchase more affordable hearing aids over the counter at pharmacies and stores across the country.”
Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted, “Good news: The FDA has issued a new rule to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter.”
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The new rule is expected to save some families as much as $3,000 for hearing aids. According to Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, an estimated 38 million Americans will suffer some degree of hearing loss, including half of those over 75.
Biden is correct that the executive order he signed did lead the FDA to act.
But the law that allowed him to do that was actually signed by former President Donald Trump.
That occurred in September 2017.
Grassley and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren sponsored the original measure. Once Trump signed it, the FDA had three years to draft the rule.
As PBS reported last October, when the FDA indicated it was finally going to craft the regulation, the announcement “follows prodding from medical committees and Congress, which in 2017 instructed the agency to lay out a plan for over-the-counter hearing devices by August 2020. The agency missed that deadline, in part due to the workload of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Free Press.
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