Most people who read my Substack likely know that I’m deaf, by which I mean that I have serious hearing loss.
The naive understanding of deafness is that “deaf” means something closer to “what’s a sound?” than “what help do I need to mostly hear enough to get by in life?” If you’ve never met a deaf person in real life, it may be a surprise to you that the majority of deaf people, particularly in our technological age, are much closer to the latter than the former.
Generally I say “deaf” to describe my situation because that’s one, easily understandable, word. In the world of hearing loss we have an accepted heuristic that the difference between “hard of hearing” and “deaf” is that the latter requires technological help to use the telephone, which I do. I have powerful hearing aids, which I wear the majority of the time when I am awake.
Many insurances don’t cover hearing aids at all. My present insurance is excellent in many ways, but does not cover hearing aids, so my next pair will cost me about $6,000.
I have excellent hearing aids solely because I used to be on Medicaid. In my state, Medicaid covers hearing aids, for which I am profoundly grateful. I got my first set of good hearing aids, ones programmed to my specific audiogram and giving me the closest approximation technologically possible to good hearing, when I moved to this generous blue state.
At every appointment, my audiologist’s office loaded me up, without asking, with all the necessary supplies: new dome covers, as they need to be changed often; new inserts that sit under the dome covers and act to anchor the hearing aid to the dome cover; and coupon codes for batteries, or even batteries themselves. They did this for all their Medicaid patients, as the only requirement to get Medicaid is to be quite poor. It meant I always had what I needed to keep my hearing aids in good working order, and none of this care ever cost me a cent.
Needing hearing aids nearly all the time means that I have to sit down and clean them about twice a month, something I tend to procrastinate as it’s rather unpleasant.
Spending every waking moment with small plastic domes pushed deeply into one’s ear canal produces a lot of what audiologists tactfully call “ear debris.” To be more specific, the friction of having hearing aids in my ears nearly all the time causes dead skin, wax, and other gross things to be generated, sometimes in fairly astonishing volume. Even if I clean my ears out every night, my hearing aids still get gross pretty often.
I was cleaning my hearing aids early this morning when I used the last of one of my supplies—the little white inserts that go under the plastic domes, which sit in my ears and collect the aforementioned “ear debris.”
Without conscious thought, I went to my computer and pulled up the site to email my audiologist’s office.
I had typed most of a request for more inserts when it suddenly hit me. What the hell was I doing?
I have a job now. A good job. I am a long way from financially comfortable, thanks to student loan debt (which is why this Substack is monetized—all subscriptions come right off my balance, for which I thank my paid subscribers, from the bottom of my heart). But I absolutely, positively, do not need free supplies for my hearing aids.
I was about to ask for more free supplies, supplies that I can easily provide for myself.
Why?
For seven years now, the taxpayers in my state had been providing for my hearing tech, and that was my unquestioned, unexamined, habitual expectation. Without pausing to think, I went right into the “mode” of going to an authority and seeking a handout to meet my needs.
This is troubling, to say the least. It is not in any way who I want to be.
No, I’m not being unncessarily self-condemnatory here. Once I consciously realized what I was doing, there was no question that I would buy them myself. I placed an Amazon order and will have new inserts in plenty of time for the next cleaning session.
What I am doing is not self-flagellating. I’m pointing out an unintended consequence of welfare—and yes, Medicaid is a form of welfare—which is the way that it can warp one’s character into a place where self-reliance is an afterthought, not an initial impulse.
No, I’m not arguing that these programs shouldn’t exist. Without my hearing aids, college would have been so much more difficult that I don’t know if I would have been able to graduate. I oppose blanket universal healthcare, but the takeover of 1/6 of the US economy by the government is very different from a program targeted to the desperately poor. As in my case, sometimes healthcare isn’t accessible any other way, and such programs can sometimes pay for themselves. (This year, I will pay in taxes, many times over, what these hearing aids cost the taxpayers.)
What am I arguing, then? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps I’m just pointing out that everything comes with trade-offs. Consequences. An expectation of handouts and being provided with one’s needs, instead of earning the money to take care of oneself, is one consequence of welfare. This matters, and it should be something that we take very seriously as we consider more and more forms of it — more stimulus payments, forgiving student loan debt (or even mortgages, as some of our congressional representatives have argued), more government intervention into our lives, all for our own good, of course!
In the last two years, in particular, Americans have come to expect the government to act as snowplow parents, removing all obstacles and dangers.
This is a very dangerous and slippery slope.
This morning, I caught myself and only stumbled. I will be more careful in the future.
We are in an historical moment when many Americans are arguing for more and more government action to take care of us.
We should all be mindful of how slippery this slope is.
We should all be terrified of what lies at the bottom of it.
I'm leaving a comment because you linked to this in one of your new pieces about American history and there's no comments. It's all alone! I'm sure your subscriber count was smaller than now. I don't think I even subscribed until last autumn. This must've been one of your first pieces. I think you've excised yourself from Twitter for about a year now? Nice job!
have a nice day :)