More Sleep Apnea Fun

Today I continue my non-chronological sleep apnea report:

I went to my doctor and got my prescription for my CPAP machine. Before doing this I had to go in for a second study to determine the pressure maintained by the CPAP. This seemed odd to me because all of the research I had done indicated that static pressure CPAP’s were old school. The newer machines would automatically adjust the pressure and use the minimal amount required for a successful breath.

I can’t help but think that the sleep study centers have no financial incentive to cut the revenue they get from patients in half… but I digress

I left my doctors with a prescription stating “CPAP at 9cm H20 pressure”.

Armed with the right to buy a CPAP, I decided to ask the extremely helpful Mike over at “SleepGuide: The Sleep Apnea Online Community” what to do next. Mike recommended I get the “Respironics M-Series with A-Flex or the ResMed S8II” from on online provider like Cpap.com.

Ahh – now we are back to the auto-cpap machine. Why is it that all the people I know with sleep apnea have an auto-cpap machine but I have a prescription for an old fashioned static CPAP?

Anyway, I followed Mike’s suggestion and went to cpap.com. Good News! cpap.com will take my CPAP prescription and sell me an auto-cpap. Bad New! cpap.com does not take insurance and is not in my insurance company’s preferred network. I have to pay them out of pocket for the machine and get a reimbursement from my insurance company. When it’s all said and done, buying a machine from cpap.com will run me around $480 (plus the aggravation of paying out of pocket and time spent filing insurance claims).

If I shop from an in network provider, I have to get the static CPAP machine but I spend about $400 less.

Life’s little tradeoffs…

I didn’t want to spend the extra $400 (and I really loathe filing my own insurance claims) so I went with the static machine. We will see how I do with the static machine. I have to go take a class before I can use it.

I haven’t gone into details but the getting this all squared away took about 4 hours of my work day – not including the time and money spent on the second sleep study where they figured out the pressure level for the CPAP.

This would have been so much cheaper had they given me one study to determine my apnea, prescribed me an auto-CPAP machine, and let me order the thing online.

Very inefficient health-care in my opinion.

Regardless, I am eagerly awaiting my machine so I can get a good nights sleep for a change.

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