If you have no idea what happened on March 13, 2008, you're in good company. What happened on that day rocked the world of absolutely nobody except for the owners of sleep labs across the country: Medicare, for the first time ever, agreed to reimburse for CPAP equipment prescribed pursuant to home tests, rather than under the ordinary in-laboratory sleep studies almost all of us with Sleep Apnea experienced. The reason this got the sleep lab operators all worked up is that home testing is generally as effective and much, much cheaper than a full laboratory test. The stated cost of my in-lab test was over $5,000 (although my insurance paid for almost all of it); the stated cost of a good home test is a couple of hundred bucks. Naturally, the sleep lab guys are soiling themselves for fear that home testing could put them out of business.

We at SleepGuide aren't worked up over home testing. If it helps raise awareness of Sleep Apnea by making diagnosis more affordable and accessible to people, that's great. But there is so much work on the back-end that the medical community has to do to help people once they are diagnosed, that we think this whole home testing thing is a bit of a tempest in a teapot. Right now, if you're not computer savvy and at an online forum like this, if you have a question about your therapy, tough luck. Right now, you probably don't even know what questions to ask about your treatment, and precious few in the medical community will tell you. Right now, you're probably having a tough time with treatment and think that CPAP or some other treatment for Sleep Apnea is just not for you, and nobody is reaching out to tell you that it's not true. So until the medical community gets a grip on these kind of issues, we think getting worked up over home testing is premature.