One of the ways that the Health Care plan will save money is

[WCGreen]

to allow people to purchase medical equipment instead of renting.

This is bad news for a huge part of the medical equipment industry.

An easy solution that I see is to purchase the equipment outright and then have a monthly maintenance fee to guarantee the equipment.

As it stands now, the breathing machine I use costs about $ 1.200 to purchase outright. It is rented to me now for about $125 per month.

The current plans allow me to rent that piece of equipment for up to three years. After that, the company receives no more cash from the insurance company or Medicare.

How they get around this is to switch the machine out after about 20 months which starts that 36 month running again. The machine they took from my house is then rented again to another person.

These machines are durable and I have yet to have a problem and I have been on O2 for over 5 years now.

So, pay a $25 monthly maintenance fee so that the patient feels comfortable knowing they can rely on getting another machine if there current one was too fail.

Of course this is a simplification of the plan and I was going by information I had gathered about industry practices and my personal questions that I have asked my O2 provider. I will look into this more over the next few days and see what is up with all this.

[Clio the Leo]

1. If you're talking about a CPAP machine....

.... I think that's the correct spelling that helps those with sleep apnea, this is wonderful news. Both of my parents sound like Darth Vader in their sleep because of their masks. :)

(Not Cheney, the real Darth Vader)

[WCGreen]

2. It's all machines and smaller devices that assist people

with various medical problems.