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How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

aphyr.com

131–140 of 273 posts

Re: How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

#131
post #106

Why dont you just ask someone coming from India to get you one ? They are available over the counter in India and there are a lot of Indian people hopping on a flight to the US all the time. I am sure there is someone in your office you can request, or someone in your locality.

You really need a professional to configure the CPAP, otherwise it can mess up your lungs (too much airflow) or make your sleep apnea worse (not enough airflow). That's why these are considered a prescription--the prescription is the settings on the machine.

Not at all. You can figure out how to configure one yourself with a few hours reading on /r/CPAP or watching YouTube. Source: myself after trying to acquire one and get it configured for months through a similar bureaucratic nightmare as the article.

Re: How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

#132
post #39

Yeah try importing a CPAP from the states into Vietnam if you want a real adventure. A $650 cpap machine costs well over $2K here. So I thought I'd import one. Apparently you need a prescription in the states? Ok, get a "prescription" from an online service that basically just asks you if you snore over a video call. Amazing. Buy machine and have it sent to a freight forwarding service. They fuck up the paperwork. It…

lol I felt that last part

I had a business trying to get an institutional trading account, and all these compliance officers kept the application in limbo for a year

finally the exchange’s general counsel or someone maybe even the CFO said I needed to show my company’s AML/KYC policy.

I have my lawyer draft a comprehensive AML/KYC policy.

I told the financial institution that my legal counsel had prepared our "ANTI-MONEY LAUNDERING AND “KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER” PROCEDURES Which should fulfill all of your company’s compliance goals”

And apparently that contained the magic words because they approved the account instantly, after being in account creation limbo for an entire year, they never even asked for or looked at the document

Re: How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

#133
post #86
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like the zx spectrum was almost built perfectly for that.

Russians have a significant presence on the ZX Spectrum game and demo scene. There may be something to this.

There were several similar Z80-based systems made at the time, locally, such as the Hobbit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit_(computer)

Re: How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

#134
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you not try to pay some coffee money? Do you have local Vietnamese connections? Seems like something you could have paid 500-1000k (20-40USD) and been done with.

Yes they wouldn't accept it.

You aren’t telling us how it was offered. Openly in front of multiple people, discretely, etc.

Re: How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

#135
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Byzantine punishments were more along the lines of castration and facial amputation.

Who's to say we can't get a little retro? Little late for the new year's stuff, but let's party like it's 499!

[flagged]

Re: How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

#136
Reimbursement is the #1 barrier to bringing a novel therapy to market in the US for the company I'm working for. The technology is decades old and proven (the novel part is where it's being put in the body) - the clinical benefits are now proven.

But it's a battle to get US insurance to cover the therapy - we have about 3x more patients confirmed as clinically eligible than actually get the therapy. (That is to say, US insurance rejects ~75%+ of claims).

As a result, there is an entire segment of the org dedicated to reimbursement. We have a team of professional insurance-bullshit-waders - they call, they file claims, they follow up, and I hear them asking for Document Control Numbers and Call Reference Numbers. There are 'Government Affairs' people who lobby with the VA and Medica{re, aid?}.

The payer barriers outside of US have been much lower. (But EU has it's own problems with medical device barriers... a rant for another day.)

Re: How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

#137
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

eBay is pretty good at enforcing their policy banning sales of medical equipment requiring a prescription. They yank any listing for a CPAP very quickly.

Took me literally 30 seconds to find one: https://www.ebay.com/itm/404778680293 They even have a category for "Medical equipment > ventilators". If they do have such a policy, they enforce it very poorly.

I guess it varies by country. In the US they pull CPAP listings very quickly.

Policy: https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...

Re: How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

#138
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is most Americans don’t have these types of chronic health issues, so it’s not an issue for them. I have a type 1 diabetic son, the amount of money we have spent on health insurance and medical equipment/supples is criminal.

I feel sorry for you, man. I have T1D as well, but pump supplies + CGM work out to something on the order of $200 a month in Poland. I am not even sure how much exactly, because I don't bother to count since it's not big money for me. Still a lot given the median pay, and you still have to buy the pump out of pocket, but nowhere near what's going on in the States.

Yep, I have a cousin in France who is also a T1D, he pays effectively nothing for his supplies (he tried pump+CGM but he's been doing injections for so long he found the pump to be a hassle.)

Re: How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

#139
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NHS is a failed system that absolutely nobody is envious of, except brits because for some weird reason, they seem to think that the alternative is poor people dying in the streets. Similar systems as the NHS have been introduced and subsequently canned in favor of more sane approaches in other European countries, which now have better (but still socialized) healthcare as a consequence. There is no central europe…

"The NHS is a failed system that absolutely nobody is envious of" ...except people in the US.

If you think the problems of US healthcare are caused by too much „free market“ and could be solved or even marginally improved by an NHS-style socialized replacement with even more government interference, you have never seriously investigated the issue.

Re: How to Replace Your CPAP in Only 666 Days

#140

You can now understand why the UK is holding on the its NHS with white knuckles despite the Conservative push to dissolve it by stealth.

I dunno, I’ve just spent 18 months in Dubai, where I had private insurance, and it was a breeze. See a UK-trained specialist for almost anything within a day or two, and hospital direct billing meant I almost never had to interact with the insurer directly. I guess my point is that as reassuring (as a Brit) as it is to know the NHS is there, private insurance isn’t necessarily bad if regulated well (and that matches…

A consistent theme in responses here is that how long you just wait for a doctor depends on location, and the preponderance of evidence suggests that the differentiating factor between locations where it is easy to see a doctor vs waiting a long time is how many golf courses are around.

Correlation isn’t causation of course. Not suggesting golf courses cause doctors. But in general in this thread I see people from heavily golfed areas saying ‘I found a doctor really quickly’ and people from golf deserts talking about long waits.

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