Diabetic Test Strip Buyers in Kansas

The widest gap in Kansas runs through one metro area

Statewide, 11.4% of Kansas adults have diagnosed diabetes, a little under the national rate of 12.1%. That figure describes very little of what is actually going on.

Kansas City reads 14.6%. Overland Park, in the same metropolitan area, reads 9.2%. Lenexa is 9.4%, Olathe 9.5%, Shawnee 9.7%. Five cities in one commuter belt, and a spread of more than five points between the highest and the lowest.

The formal widest gap in the state is Kansas City at 14.6% against Manhattan at 7.1%, which is 7.5 points. But Manhattan is a university town most of the way across the state, and the gap being that wide surprises nobody. The suburbs one drive from Kansas City reading five points lower is the finding that ought to.

Elsewhere, Topeka sits at 13.1%, Wichita at 12.6% and Salina at 12.1% — all above the state figure. Lawrence reads 7.9%. The pattern is consistent: the older working cities are high, the university towns and the newer suburbs are low.

If you are on the Kansas City side of the state

You have the option most Kansans do not, which is to hand supplies over, count the cash and go home the same afternoon. From the Johnson County suburbs it is a short drive. From Lawrence and Topeka it is a reasonable one.

Ring first and agree a figure before you set off. Describe what you have exactly: the brand printed on the box, the strip count, how many boxes, and the expiry dates as written on them. A number quoted against a vague description will move when someone sees the actual boxes, and you will be standing in a car park when it does.

There is a border quirk here worth knowing. Missouri has no buyer listed anywhere in the state, so for people on the Missouri side of the same metro, the Kansas City listing is the nearest in-person option they have. It is one of the few places in the middle of the country where a state line makes that little practical difference.

If you are west of Topeka, this is a postal transaction

Kansas spreads under three million people across 704 ZIP codes. That is a lot of postcodes for the population, and it is exactly the density problem that stops a second buyer setting up. Wichita is the largest city in the state and has no listing of its own. Neither does Salina, and neither does anywhere further west.

The prepaid label reaches all 704 of them and costs you nothing regardless of which one you are posting from. Payment is made within 24 hours of the parcel arriving and being verified, so from western Kansas the realistic timeline is a few days in transit and then a day.

Because distance makes repeat trips to a post office pointless, this is the state where it pays to gather everything before sending anything. Ten or more boxes earns a better per-box rate than the same boxes sent in dribs and drabs, and a mixed lot — different brands, strips alongside sensors alongside pods — is quoted as one lot rather than picked apart item by item. There is no advantage to separating anything out.

Two things survive their expiry date

The best-read article in the country on selling diabetic supplies tells people that expired stock is worth very little or nothing. It is right about test strips. A strip past its date can return a false reading, and a false blood glucose reading is a hazard, not a discount — those genuinely should be thrown away.

It is wrong about two named items, and both of them get binned constantly. Expired Omnipod pods, whether 5, DASH or Classic, are still bought, at a reduced rate. Expired Dexcom G7 sensors are too.

The exception does not stretch. Expired Dexcom G6 sensors are not bought, expired Libre sensors are not bought, and no test strip past its date is bought at any rate at all. Two items, both named, nothing else.

Sensors and pods, not only strips

People clearing a cupboard tend to think of this as a test strip transaction, and increasingly it is not. Dexcom G6 sensors and transmitters, G7 sensors and receivers, and FreeStyle Libre 1, 2 and 3 sensors are all bought, and a single sealed box of sensors is often the most valuable thing in the pile.

Libre carries a condition that is easy to trip over: US retail versions only. Sensors bought abroad cannot be resold here, regardless of how new or how sealed they are.

Omnipod 5, DASH and Classic pods are bought, pods rather than controllers. Some sealed Medtronic and Tandem components are as well, though those are worth a phone call rather than a guess. On the strip side the names are FreeStyle Lite, Contour Next, Accu-Chek Guide, Aviva and SmartView, OneTouch Verio and Ultra, and True Metrix — and a 100-count box beats two 50-count boxes of the same strip.

What will get a box turned down

Three things, and all three are pass or fail rather than negotiable. The seal has to be factory-intact in the original packaging. An opened box is worth nothing to anybody, because nobody downstream can verify what happened to it while it was open, and this is the single most common reason a parcel gets returned.

The supplies cannot have come through a government-covered program. Those cannot be resold. Retail purchases and private insurance are a different matter, and a pharmacy label with your own name on it makes no difference — you are not being asked to account for how you came to have them.

And in-date test strips should have six months or more left before expiry. Under six months the tier falls away quickly, because the person who eventually uses them needs a usable window in which to do it.