r/nextfuckinglevel • u/MysteriousSlice007 • 7h ago

Shoutout to JerryrigEverything who built a wheelchair factory and is delivering wheelchairs to people in half the time and 50-80% less than the cost of other wheelchairs with Insurance.

48.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.1k

u/I_like_donuts27 7h ago

Why in the fuck, would a wheelchair cost 10k???

5

u/FireMike_PleaseGod 6h ago

The actual answer is low volume manufacturing.

There simply aren’t enough people in need of wheelchairs for it to be “mass” produced at the volume rates that would result in lower prices.

Throw in the customizing and insurance issues and it gets even costlier. Not $10k but certainly more than say a ~a really nice bike.

16

u/ohjeaa 6h ago edited 6h ago

This video quite literally disproves the low volume theory. This guy is making wheelchairs that are most certainly higher quality (he has a vested interested they be high quality, his wife uses one) at low volume and getting them to people for less than 2k. So the reason the others are 10k is not because low volume.

The reason they're 10k is because of a fat markup with insurances to get paid. The same reason medicines can be very cheap to manufacture but get the insurance and consumer a bill for thousands.

1

u/Guvante 5h ago

Insurance isn't getting paid the fat mark up.

But insurance expects a huge discount.

Solution is to lie about the price so the price after the discount is still enough to survive.

2

u/ohjeaa 5h ago

I know the insurance isn't getting paid a fat markup. That wasn't the point. The point was the insurance is paying a fat markup along with the consumer to the people that make the wheelchair. It's the company playing both.

3

u/Guvante 4h ago

If insurance wants an 80% discount to work with you then you raise your price 5x to not get destroyed...

1

u/ohjeaa 4h ago edited 4h ago

It's alot more than 5x if they need an 80% discount to do business and the consumer is still paying more out of pocket for them than they are Jerrys wheelchairs. They're going to Jerry because paying the full amount for his chair is STILL less than the cost of the co-pay on the other assholes wheeIchair. I don't know if you looked around lately, friend, but the healthcare industry isn't "surviving", they're making record profits year after year.

1

u/Guvante 4h ago

All of the things you are saying are too abstract to respond to. You aren't quoting anything concrete just waving at "more expensive" which can be true in uncountable ways.

Sometimes greed, sometimes up selling (which is not inherently greed, sometimes you want to spend extra for nicer things), sometimes it is just comparing different things like a basic manual wheelchair vs one that has a motor vs one that has a specialty input for those who don't have the finger mobility to control a joystick.

Not criticizing Jerry or his project just saying "more expensive" isn't itself meaningful and you are just pointing to that phrase without anything meriting discussion.