How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

Having one's tonsils and adenoids removed and getting palette-hardening RF treatment seems like it would be a lot easier and more permanent than this rigamarole. Worked for me, and I suspect it would for a lot of other folks too.

I don't think advocating for invasive surgery is a good way of dealing with awful insurance bureaucracy. With OP's luck, he might need 666 days to get his hospital fees sorted by insurance.

Snark aside, AFAIK palate hardening is not terribly permanent, it works by creating scar tissue, which can become more floppy than the original tissue as you age. It's only useful if a floppy palate is causing obstructions/snoring. Removing tonsils and adenoids will may free up some space in the airway, but it's not going to make any difference if they're not the cause of the obstruction, and this may weaken your immune system.

While I'm sure you were trying to be helpful, I do wish people would stop treating sleep apnea like it's something that's easy to fix. Just have these body parts removed. Just lose weight. Just get on CPAP. Just fix your allergies. Just have your jaw broken and moved forward. Just have an electrode implanted. Etc.

I don't know. I feel like the compliance checks are more expensive than the machines at this point. They retail for around $/€ 500. I suspect that sleep centres (or whoever hands out CPAP devices to patients where you are) get significant volume discounts. Say they last for 5 years. That's a near zero cost.

Of course, someone is upcharging somewhere, but that's hardly the patient's fault.

>How does that not demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the regulations?

The only reason there was a recall was because of the regulations and the gargantuan and slow bureaucratic apparatus surrounding Philips.

Philips tried, and would have succeeded without the regulations, to brush this off. They stalled, delated, cajoled, and lied.

Consumer protection laws (i.e. just sue after someone dies) are almost worthless in this case. No amount of rationally acting rational actor's next of kins bringing individual actions after the death of a loved one would have gotten Philips to move. Those wouldn't have even occurred because the only reason the link was made was because of a medical device monitoring system put in place by the FDA and government medical researchers looking into anomalous death statistics whose only common factor was Philips CPAP machines and the ensuing technical evaluation. Numerous deaths occurred, were attributed by some other cause because dissecting a deceased person and examining their alveoli for microscopic particles isn't an action typically performed after someone dies of what appears to be a stroke in their sleep.

Indeed, when this whole mess first started Philips deflected and delayed for years and their teams of lawyers would have annihilated each individually rationally acting rational actor's lawyers one by one to protect their bottom line drowning each litigant in delays, appeals, and litigation by financial attrition as the cases popped up one-by-one.

"Duh gubmint" is slow and often ineffective, but in this case the only reason anything happened at all and Philips CPAP machines aren't still out there literally and actually killing people is because of "a fat cat gubmint parasite" enforcing "onerous and burdensome" laws.

Of course I could be wrong. We all remember how magnanimous and ethical corporations were prior to all of these systems being put into place, don't we?

Wait. We don't?

God, reading this is awful. I have a CPAP and I would not be willing to go one night without it. I'd buy the parts/machine out of pocket and make insurance pay for it later. The impact on my health and quality of life is way too high.

But I'm privileged to be able to do that. I can shell out $1,000 for a medical device in an emergency, and my doctors are local and return my calls. Not everyone is so lucky.