Insurance and Ebay

Insurance and Ebay, oh yes I found a way to put them together, maybe you have too. Let me explain, we used to be on AHCCS (Arizona Health Cost Containment System) for our insurance. It was the state version of medicaid and it ended up being pretty good insurance. I never saw a bill or paid one dime for any of Kortnie's needs, the ER up here, helicopter ride to Phoenix, a day in the PICU at Phoenix Children's Hospital followed by 4 days on the D-floor when she was diagnosed. Never paid anything for DR visits or labwork. We never even had a copay for insulin, needles, glucagon, test strips, or lancets. When we got on a pump we never paid a dime for the pump, training or pump supplies. I know I had mentioned before that when we were on AHCCS they limited us to only 150 strips per month and anything extra we had to pay out of pocket, oh and we had to buy our own ketone strips as well. I NEVER KNEW HOW GOOD WE HAD IT! We got put off of our AHCCS at the end of December 2010. They said we make too much money now, we are only like $100 over the limit. Ever since then I've been searching high and low for new insurance. I found some that was pretty reasonable, $279 a month for our family of 5, I quickly signed up while intending to keep reasearching more options. My husband has insurance through his work, but it's a whopping $940/month! I'm still researching new insurances, meanwhile when we were on AHCCCS I always every month filled our perscriptions and got as much "stuff" as we were allowed each month. By doing that and proper rotation, I've managed to build up about a 8 month supply of extra "stuff" except for test strips. Well, our new insurance started on March 1st, and guess what, it doesn't cover any of Kortnie's items, she's covered for doctor visits and labwork, with a copay of course, but there are no discounts on any of her medications, strips, or supplies! I've been scrambling to figure out what to do, and I've been relying on my stockpile of supplies and insulin, but I'm getting worried! I did buy a vial of insulin last payday and paid $118 for it! Yikes! And I've continued buying test strips, right now American Diabetes Wholesale is running a special, 200 strips and 1 meter (with a thing of 10 strips) for $101.99. So I bought 2 sets of those. Then I thought, why don't I look on EBAY? And sure enough, you can get all kinds of test strips on EBAY. You have to be a pretty proactive bidder to get them though. Today, for the first time I purchased some strips off of ebay, 3 transactions later and I've gotten myself 500 test strips for $166.95 (that includes shipping) and comes out to a total of .339cents per strip! I am pretty excited, but also nervous, as I always am when I buy stuff off of ebay. Has anyone else ever gotten D supplies off of EBAY? (if you do go look at D-supplies on Ebay, remember to look for listings that have the expiration date in the description, or pictures of the exp date on the packages.) Also, on ebay we found a cute little ebay store called Pump'N In-Syle a lady makes cute little pump pouches, great prices too, most of hers are in the $10-$15 range. Check out her store if you like http://stores.ebay.com/PUMPN-IN-STYLE