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Buckle up babies, because I’m gonna tell you about my experience with sleep apnea. I was diagnosed 5 years ago. To get diagnosed, your primary doctor has to write you a referral to a sleep doctor. The sleep doctor has to do a consultation and then an overnight sleep study
A sleep study is where you drive to a clinic at 9pm, they hook about 50 electrodes to you, make you extremely uncomfortable, and then they tell you: ok now go to sleep. We’ll be watching you from another room, it’s not weird
Keep in mind: all of these places get booked months out. So when you get the appointment to do the sleep study, it’s never convenient and you have to rearrange your whole life around it
Once you do the study, now they are allowed to SELL YOU a CPAP machine. You can’t just buy one on your own. You need to jump through all the hoops first, to have the privilege of purchasing one and they are not cheap.
Your insurance will pay for it, unless your deductible isn’t met. So you’ll have to at least pay the deductible. Also be prepared to spend about $150 every 3-4 months for replacement parts
Totally worth it though. Once you get used to the CPAP machine, you’ll sleep like a baby. It’s even worth putting up with the stigma of it being a fat person’s disease & with the well-meaning people in your life who tell you that maybe if you just lost weight you wouldn’t need it
However in my case, the sleep clinic I went to sold me a machine that had been recalled by the FDA. They closed down six months later. I got a new sleep doctor, who then abruptly retired.
None of this was an issue until last week, when my CPAP died on me while I was on vacation. But hey, I’ve got insurance, and I’ve got money, I can just get a replacement right? Wrong
It requires a prescription. Which only comes from the sleep doctor. Who makes his money billing your insurance for thousands of dollars for consultations and sleep studies. Who you can’t even see without a referral from your regular doctor
So even though you already have a machine, the machine has a removable chip showing all your sleep stats for the last five years, you can’t buy one until you start from square one and prove to all of these people that you actually need it
Called a sleep clinic back home to set up an appointment. They are booked through December
And that, my friends, is how I- a man with good insurance and money in the bank- wound up standing in a stranger’s driveway, 900 miles from home, in a pandemic, paying him cash for a used CPAP he was selling on Craigslist. Greatest country in the world over here
By the way: paying him $350 for a USED older machine with less features on it, which is incidentally what my deductible would have been on a brand new machine, if I were allowed to buy one but I’m not
And then setting the fucking thing up myself using YouTube videos, rather than having a trained specialist set it up for me using my sleep data, that for some reason, I’m not allowed to see
So yeah when I see guys like Ted Cruz talking about how Americans want to keep their medical insurance as it is now, I know that they have never had to purchase second-hand medical equipment in someone’s driveway
