Changing insurance restarts rental???

My DME is now telling me that, because I changed insurance companies 5 months into my rental, that the rental period started over.

This is, of course, a different story than the one they told me in August, when I gave them my new insurance company information and asked them what would happen. I was ensured that the money already paid would count toward the new rental. And it's also a different story than the one they told me in November, when I asked to pay off the remaining copays for the rental period because I was losing my job and wanted to make sure it was covered. They billed me 7 remaining months' worth of copays.

How can they do this? They are charging twice for the same product! They charged my old insurance 5 months, which was nearly half the rental period, then they restarted the rental period with my new insurace. Even if it's legal, it reeks of fraud to me!

I am currently sending them a copy of my receipt from November which states "7 remaining months"... We'll see if they will actually honor that. (Yeah, right...)

So glad Lent is nearly over--Everything smells like fish!
Edit: It is probably legal--but who knows? Run it by the legal department.
In any case, if you have to start over with a new rental, be sure you get a NEW machine!

You need to see what your new insurance pays versus the old one. It might be that the new one pays less or more and that would affect your remaining months. You paid the remaining 7 months co-pay without knowing what the new insurance company covered.. In fact, the new one may not even have a contract with that DME to supply CPAP. You should not have paid 7 months in advance because that assumes that the new company will pay the same amount the remaining 7 months as the old one--not a good assumption to make. Also, you will have a NEW deductible to pay on the new insurance before they pay anything. You may have thrown away 7 months of machine rental. At least it's not a huge amount ($20 per month?)

In my case I was with United Healthcare at the beginning of my 10 month rental. My insurance changed to Anthem on the first day of the 10th month, and Anthem paid the final month.

I would think that if the rental were restarting from month one that you should be given a brand new machine with zero hours on it.

If I were you I would bring the machine back and tell them since you have to start over you will do so with and new DME and a new machine.

I changed insurance effective September 1. So I'm now 7 months into the "new" rental period. So I can't really take my business to another DME at this point.

The new insurance company does not charge a deductible if I go through my primary care provider, and I had a referral from them for the CPAP, so no deductible applies here.

They had all of my new insurance information when I paid what they said was the remainder of the balance in November. So that should have had nothing to do with the old insurance. Although I guess what happened is that the person who handled that was confused between my old insurance and my new insurance and didn't notice that the copay was different and that the rental period was supposed to start over. But I paid what they told me to, even after making sure they new my insurance had changed, and they told me that would be everything I owed for copays on the machine.

I actually did get a brand new machine in February, because my original one malfunctioned. Had to fight really hard to get it, but I did get the zero blower hours machine.

Basically, 2 different people both gave me wrong information, which royally messed up my financial planning and budgeting (seeing as I have exactly zero income at the moment, that's not hard to do!). And I also have a really hard time believing that the insurance company really wants to pay for a full rental period when nearly half of it has already been paid by somebody else. Just doesn't seem right.

You may want to alert your insurance co. and let them fight it out for you.

Like , put them in a pit, and air it on pay per view!