Urinary Incontinence Support Group
Urinary incontinence is the involuntary excretion of urine from one's body. It is often temporary, and it almost always results from an underlying medical condition. Stress, functional, and urge incontinence are the most common forms. Share with other support group members and learn from their stories and experiences.
To those who use absorbent products, does your insurance cover them? If so, what brands/companies are you able to go through?
I have medical coverage through the veterans administration and they offer a limited selection of products, none of which work for my needs. I’ve resorted to just buying what I need online, but it would be nice to eliminate that expense.
The VA gave me a prescription for depend briefs which I found I needed to change about 7 or 8 times a day. They had no problem giving me as many cases as I’d need to make that work. That would have been fine if my day revolved around a diaper changing schedule. I told my continence nurse that that was limiting my ability to function on a daily basis. She added a prescription for poise pads to my file and told me to use them as boosters to extend the time between changes. That didn’t work as she’d planned, but it added a case of pads to the 3+ cases of briefs I was using in a month. After some research and trial on my own, I’m now using about a case and a half of Northshore megamax every month.
Point being: they’re willing to spend more money on more supplies because the cost per brief is lower rather than buy far fewer premium briefs at a much lower overall cost.
I just wish I knew how to navigate that system better since I feel like I’ve exhausted all my options. I’m sure there are companies that work with insurance providers that would be able to work my case in, but I haven’t found any that provide premium products.
Anyway, if anyone has any info or insights, I’d be greatly appreciative.
In our experience, the VA will try to do as little as possible for as long as possible. My husband needs a stem cell treatment for some pain. If he got the treatment, he'd likely so needing steroid shots. But they seem willing to pay for the steroid shots indefinitely to avoid the other procedure.
So far all of my insurances companies have denied my request for diapers. I haven't gone to my current insurance company yet to see because I have been doing like you, just using my own money to buy good diapers. I couldn't work or live a decent quality of life if I didn't have good diapers.
She tried going through prosthetics since apparently she had found a loophole that allowed her to use the prosthetics department to help obtain something for another patient. They turned me down since I was trying to get one time use disposable products and they could only help if it was something reusable. By that point, I was tired of going back repeatedly with the same problem and same results. I’ve heard of other people being able to get exactly what they needed but I never found out how.