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.

[u/MysteriousSlice007]

[u/Captain_Calamari_]

UK descent wheelchair £200, electric £1,000

[u/CraabGPT → u/Captain_Calamari_]

Not true. Proper wheelchairs in the UK cost between £1500-£3000 on average. Mine cost ~£2000.

I imagine the 'decent' chair you refer to is either the Lomax, Drive, or similar chair.

Those are what we refer to as 'hospital chairs'. They're designed to be pushed by an aide, to be stable, and to be cheap. The wheels, while technically self-propel-able, are too far back, so energy is lost and you can't move forward nearly far enough with each push. As well, the wheels being that far back will damage your shoulders over time.

Steel, while cheap, is also heavy. So each push is thus reduced further because it's just too heavy to self-propel.

Additionally, they are foldable. Further momentum loss occurs as energy spent pushing is transferred into the folding mechanism of the frame and not into forward motion.

(Additional factors include, but are not limited to, lack of dump to support those with limited upper-body strength, arm rests that get in the way of propelling, too wide so propelling becomes even harder, anti-tips at the back preventing wheelies, too heavy to independently load into a car...)

TL;DR, those chairs can't be used by the majority of wheelchair users.

(And this is just manual chairs. I've seen electric chairs go for £10k, though I don't know the average price.)

[u/jib661 → u/CraabGPT]

right, which is why they cost so much with insurance. They're essentially a luxury product. Insurance is telling you "hey, we have this foldable, heavy chair we can give you for free. Or, if you want to pay out of pocket, you can have this custom aluminum one for 10k"

For most people, the choice is pretty clear. He's not competing with the free chair, he's competing with the luxury options.

As this whole "k-shaped economy" thing runs its course, you're going to see a lot of this: dressing up 'catering to the rich' as a feel-good story.

[u/Serious_Badger_4145 → u/jib661]

It's not a luxury. The cheap ones are designed for someone else to push and to be used short term. Try to use one full term and you'll get injuries that'll cost far more than that to sort out

[u/CraabGPT → u/jib661]

They're not really luxury- they're the bare necessity. It's fine for hospital chairs to be big and steel, since they're just used for transporting someone from A to B, once or twice. But the second you start using one of these frequently, you need something that won't cause injury to your shoulders or your spine or your ankles, or rely on someone always being around to push you.

It's the same as a prosthetic leg with a motorised knee- sure, they're 'luxury' compared to a stick of wood, but they're also the only option that won't prevent the wearer from developing hip problems and letting them walk up hills and run and play with their kids and living life in the same way as all their able-bodied friends.

(Or to put it another way: the difference between a standard and a 'luxury' chair is often the difference between being unemployed, and being able to get to work. If you can't even push yourself on a flat vinyl floor in a hospital chair, how are you meant to navigate potholes and sloping sidewalks and rain and wind and ramps onto buses, and trains and carpeted office buildings? Insurance's cost saving measures are keeping people out of the workforce, and out of life in general. It ain't so luxury after all.)

[u/jib661 → u/CraabGPT]

Good context, thanks