The Medicare option seems absolutely crazy. This is $795 JUST FOR THE STRIPS? YOU have to pay $12.95 PER TEST? (Plus your doctor's monitoring fee). I'm not on Medicare yet (if I was, I'd have used it this past week).
I have my own InRatio meter. I buy my own strips. A box of 48 strips on eBay costs around $200 -- they may have a shorter expiration date than a brand new box, so you may have good reason to test weekly. (According to some on the board, the InRatio strips are still good for up to a year after they expire -- in my experience, this is correct). Medical suppliers also charge less than Alere does for the strips, from what I've seen.
I was testing weekly until last week, when I thought I might push my testing intervals out to two weeks -- but then decided that ten days between tests would have been enough. I'm glad I didn't wait the full two weeks -- my INR, for some reason I'm not entirely sure of, dropped from 3.1 ten days earlier, to 1.1. I increased my dose of warfarin, and have been testing almost daily to see if it's starting to rise. What this means is that I'm burning through strips more rapidly than usual. It's good to have extras - but not for $13 a strip. (Of course, if I had Medicare, I'd have probably gone to a doctor and had him or her help manage my INR, and the strips used would have been the ones at the doctor's office or the blood draw at the lab). My point here is that I don't agree that weekly testing is overkill. My INR had been in range, pretty stable, and I had no clue that my INR dropped. If I had waited the extra four days for testing, I wouldn't have known my INR was low, or made any dosage increases to deal with it.
(And I still believe that anyone on warfarin who is able to do a self test SHOULD be able to get a meter and strips. It's empowering, and it allows them to monitor without having to go to a doctor office or lab or other inconvenient place)
