When equipment breaks: repair, replacement, and who pays

First, the safety rule

Who pays depends on how you have it

• Rented equipment is ours to maintain. While an item is on rental, servicing and repair are the supplier’s job at no cost to you — that is one of the genuine advantages of renting. Rent or buy →
• Purchased equipment under warranty goes down the warranty route. Medicare’s supplier standards require suppliers to honor warranties rather than shrug at them — our warranty & returns policy says how we do.
• Equipment your plan paid to provide can generally have repairs covered while you still medically need it — the repair claim needs the same kind of documentation the original claim did, which is why the route runs through us rather than a repair shop.
• Out-of-warranty, privately owned equipment is yours — we will tell you honestly whether a repair is worth making before anyone spends anything.

Replacement rather than repair

Equipment that is lost, damaged beyond repair, or has simply worn out at the end of its useful lifetime can be replaced under plan rules — each of those three routes wants its own documentation of what happened. A replacement inside the useful lifetime without that documentation is where ‘same or similar’ denials come from.

What to have ready when you call

• The model, from the label on the frame — it is usually there.
• What it is doing, or not doing, and when it started.
• Whether it is rented or purchased — if you do not know, we can look it up.
• For anything electrical: whether the outlet works and the cord is undamaged. A surprising share of ‘broken’ equipment is a tripped outlet.

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