Medical Supply Payment Plan Switcheroo

We live in Michigan, USA.

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My wife is a type 1 diabetic and she recently purchased a new insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor (CGM) through the manufacturer. Because of the high cost of the equipment, and insurance not covering for all of it, we needed to be put on a payment plan. The CGM was not "purchased" at the same time as the insulin pump, so the payment plan was originally for just the pump.

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Over the phone, my wife agreed to what she thought was an interest free 21-month loan with a $5 monthly service fee. We received a payment booklet for the monthly amount and began making payments. About 4 months later the manufacturer automatically added the CGM to the payment plan without consulting us. We didn't mind at the time because we would have asked for one anyway. When this happened they sent us an email saying $XXXX was added to your account. There wasn't any other information (this is important later).

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Three months after that my wife called the loan company to ask for a balance and we took that balance and divided by how many payments we believed we had left from the time we started with the insulin pump. We expected to need to finish the payments at the end of the 21 months. Because of this, we started making higher payments in order to meet our deadline.

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About 4 or 5 months after that we found out how to log in to the website for the loan company and the balance remaining was far from what we expected; our balance had barely gone down after several months of payments. We were able to use the site and see that we were being charged "service fees" anywhere from $13 to $36 on payments above $25. Payments below $25 were being charged $6. We were very surprised and believe these conditions are not what we agreed to with the company. The service fees are roughly 1/3rd of our payments, usually. In the last four months we've paid over $150 on these service fees. Further, no matter how you pay the loan company (check, phone, online) there's always an additional fee separate from these service charges.

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My wife called the manufacturer and spoke with customer service today about the discrepancy. Their stance is that they

A) will not send us the voice recording of the phone call and will only send us a voice transcript if we write their legal department,

B) they knew about the monthly fee but didn't know about the other service charges and that it's not on them.

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Further, after calling the manufacturer we discovered when they added the CGM they changed our loan duration to be 44 months, but never communicated this to us (email, paperwork, new payment book) and this was before we had an account on the loan company's website. In fact, we never received any details on the agreement, or any changes they made to the agreement (other than what was described here, the increased loan amount).

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We haven't been able to get ahold of anyone from the loan company yet. They seem to always be closed, incidentally. We're going to keep trying to get in touch with them but in the meantime I wanted outside advice. We're not looking to sue the pants off either company, but we're looking to stop the crazy and avoid being hit with unscrupulous hidden fees by the end of the loan that, at this point, may be unavoidable. To us, we're most upset that we feel we're playing a game we don't know the rules to. We're left wondering if what has transpired is legal. Can they withhold our recorded "verbal contract" and instead potentially leave us with an altered transcript? Can the loan company continue nickel and dime us in ways we didn't agree to?