Tandem has told me that they cannot currently send out their Tslim-Control IQ pumps to Medicare users. They claim that Medicare has a hold on all approvals until they finish some kind of coding issue. They cannot give me a date certain when this will be completed. My order was approved by Tandem in early March but I have still not received the Control IQ. Has any other Medicare patient gotten the Control IQ in March/April or been given this rationale?
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Good morning @RCA221:
I’m a Medicare t:slim user that successfully upgraded to Control-IQ in the last week. I got the approval and the code number so that I could start training on Monday, April 6 and actually upgraded during my next infusion set change on Wednesday, April 8, 2020.
I had actually applied for the upgrade on Jan 29 and know that my endo has signed and FAXed back the prescription approval form the same day. Then I went into “Waiting for prescription” status on the portal. I didn’t worry about it for a while, because I was in Yellowstone National Park the last half of February where I had no AC power, no internet, and was several hours away by snow coach from emergency services. In short, I would not have upgraded during February.
In early March, I was giving them the benefit of the doubt and assumed that they had a backlog, so didn’t call then. Then mid-March went into self isolation in CA (before it was mandated in the Bay Area) for two weeks and then drove to NM for more self-isolation.
I finally called their Control-IQ support number at 1 (858) 375-1473 on Friday April 2. Rather than waiting to talk to someone live, I left a voice mail saying that my prescription had been sent to them on Jan 29. I didn’t explicitly mention that I was a Medicare person.
So, I never knew about the “Medicare holdup”, don’t know whether applying on Jan 29 somehow beat the hold date, whether they made a mistake by sending me approval on April 6 without looking to see that I was covered by Medicare, whether they finally have Medicare approval to resume Control-IQ, or what … but as a Medicare patient I was approved on Monday, April 6, 2020 and have successfully (and happily) upgraded my pump this past week.
Good luck,
John
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John, thanks for the info. I will call the support # you provided, as not much to do these days anyway.
Congrats on CA doing much better than expected with Covid-19. CA should be an example for the rest of us.
Yes, it certainly appears that cities, counties, and states that were early in adopting various forms of stay-at-home rules are doing a better job of flattening the curve …
Stay safe!
John