Two companies fix most of America’s wheelchairs, and the bill to cap the wait has stalled

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By the Living Unlimited Team

On 3 August, GBH News in Boston reported that a bill which would have forced wheelchair repair companies to finish the job in ten business days did not survive the end of the Massachusetts legislative session. The Senate version was pulled as an amendment to an economic development bill in the last days of July. The House version never made it out of committee.

It is a state story in another country, and it would be easy to skip. It is worth reading anyway, because the reporting behind it lays out something that has never had a clear public account: why a flat tyre on a wheelchair can take months to fix. The Canadian version of that problem is real too. It just arrives through a completely different door.

What the bill would have done

According to GBH, the House bill would have required companies to finish repairs within ten business days, to order parts within three days, and to remove the prior authorization requirement for smaller repairs. The bill’s own text is more specific than that summary. H.4358, the redraft of Representative O’Day’s original bill, defines a timely repair as one made no later than ten business days after the request, requires a dealer to answer a repair request within one business day and to order parts within three business days, and bars insurers from requiring pre-approval for any repair of a complex rehabilitation technology wheelchair unless the original prescription is more than five years old. That last piece matters more than it sounds. Prior authorization is the approval step that sits between a technician looking at a broken chair and a technician being allowed to fix it, and on a small job it can take longer than the repair.

Representative James O’Day, who sponsored the House bill, told GBH that the companies “realize that these are pieces of equipment that are extremely expensive,” that “they make money on the front end selling them, and then they don’t put anything on the back side of this process.” His argument for the ten-day cap was blunt about the cost of the wait: if companies cannot manage it, he said, “life sort of stands still” for wheelchair users, who are “unable to go to work, they’re unable to go to school, they’re unable to get out of bed in some instances.”

Destiny Maxam, a community organizer at the Disability Policy Consortium and a wheelchair user, told GBH the failure was heartbreaking. “I’m so done waiting,” she said, “and the struggle to know that there’s a solution within arm’s reach, but I can’t grab it myself is so frustrating. Every day that the legislature, and every day that the industry, delays is another day that we’re stuck.”

The bill is not formally dead. GBH reported that the usual 31 July deadline was altered this session to let some bills keep moving, and that advocates have filed for an extension to keep these ones alive through the end of the year. State Senator John Cronin, who sponsored the Senate version, told GBH he is confident it can still pass.

Why the wait got longer

The market explanation came a few weeks earlier, on NPR’s Morning Edition on 15 July, in a segment by the same reporter. Wheelchair users told her that ten or fifteen years ago there were far more options, small local shops where the technicians knew them. That is no longer the case. Repair in the United States is now dominated by two companies, Numotion and National Seating & Mobility, both owned by private equity investment firms, each of which has bought up dozens of competitors.

Critics quoted in that segment say the resulting business model favours selling new chairs over fixing old ones, and that the companies do not hire enough technicians to keep up with repair work. The waits described are three, five and nine months or more for a part. Some users have given up and taken their chairs to a hardware store or a bike shop.

The companies did not speak to NPR directly. They responded through the National Coalition for Assistive and Rehab Technology, a nonprofit that represents suppliers, which said they “agree that the repair process must be faster and more efficient” but pointed at insurance approval as the thing slowing repairs down. NCART told GBH in August that it and its members “remain committed to working with consumers and legislators to create meaningful legislation in Massachusetts and across the country to improve the repair process of CRT equipment.” GBH also reported that NCART had previously opposed the Massachusetts bill.

Two federal bills sit alongside all this. Representative Ayanna Pressley introduced the Facilitating Access to Service and Timely (FAST) Repairs for Wheelchairs Act on 17 June, which would remove the pre-approval requirement for wheelchair and complex rehab technology repairs under Medicare Advantage plans and bring them into line with traditional Medicare. On 24 July, Senator Ed Markey and Representative Pramila Jayapal introduced an updated version of their “Health Over Wealth” bill, which would require private equity-backed health companies, including the repair companies, to publicly disclose debt, lobbying activity and costs.

Canada has the same wait and a different cause

Here is where the American story stops being transferable, and where it gets useful.

Canada has had no equivalent public reckoning with the private-equity roll-up NPR described, though one of those two American companies, National Seating & Mobility, does operate here, and it is the vendor at the centre of several of the complaints The Tyee documents in British Columbia. What the BC reporting points at is a different mechanism again: a procurement contract. The Tyee’s health reporter Michelle Gamage spent a two-part series on what it does to repair times. Equipment funding in BC runs through what is called the master standing agreement, an umbrella contract covering how the province pays for medical equipment through the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction, the Ministry of Child and Family Development, ICBC and WorkSafeBC.

Under that agreement, as The Tyee describes it, a technician who is asked for a repair has to assess the problem, generate a quote, send it to the government, and wait for approval before doing any work. The ministry told The Tyee its approval process typically takes ten to fifteen business days. A vendor who spoke to the paper on condition of anonymity, because it was the only one of several Lower Mainland businesses that would talk, said approvals can take two weeks to a month.

The same vendor described a set of contract terms that he said make the service side unprofitable: two years of free service on everything sold, the cost of batteries covered by the business, no charging for travel time, and prices for mobility scooters and power lifts frozen at their 2010 level. “It’s really hard to service something for two years when you’re not getting paid for it,” he told The Tyee. The ministry’s answer on the battery point was partial rather than a denial: it confirmed to The Tyee that batteries are supplied at no extra cost under the agreement when the equipment is first provided, and said the ministry covers the cost of replacement batteries. Jocelyn Maffin, associate director of Spinal Cord Injury BC, put the customer side plainly: with mobility device vendors, “the level of dissatisfaction is pretty high at any given time.”

The Tyee asked to speak with the Minister of Social Development and Poverty Reduction and was told she was not available; the ministry sent an email instead. It also asked National Seating & Mobility for an interview and did not hear back.

So the American diagnosis and the Canadian one point in different directions. In the United States, the reporting says consolidation removed the competition. In British Columbia, the reporting says the terms of a public contract removed the margin. What a person waiting for a footplate experiences is identical either way, which is the part worth holding onto: the delay is a design feature of whichever system pays for your chair, not a personal failure of the shop you happen to use.

What this means if you are the one waiting

This is reporting on how these systems are built, not advice about your own claim, and none of it replaces a conversation with your program or your vendor. But there are a few things worth knowing while your chair still works.

Find out now, in writing, who is authorized to repair your chair under your provincial program, whether repairs need pre-approval, and roughly how long approval takes where you live. Every province runs its own program, and the approval step is the part that varies most, so the answer worth having is the one for your own province rather than a general one.

Ask about a loaner before you need one. The Tyee’s reporting includes a Vancouver wheelchair user whose company would not lend her a replacement power-assist unit while it worked on hers, which left her stranded at home. Whether a loaner exists, and who supplies it, is a question with a better answer before a breakdown than during one.

Keep the paperwork in one place. The original funding approval, the vendor contact, the model and serial numbers, the warranty. Photographs on your phone are enough.

Put every delay in writing and date it. A record of when you reported the problem and what you were told is what moves a stalled file, and it is what you need if you escalate.

If you want the background on what counts as complex rehab technology and how to advocate for the right fit in the first place, our plain-language guide to CRT is the place to start, and our comparison of rollators, transport chairs and wheelchairs covers the choice that comes before any of this. Our piece on right to repair and adaptive equipment sets out what changed in Canadian copyright law in November 2024, and what that change does not fix.

The bottom line

The House bill would have set a ten-business-day repair deadline, though its own definition of a timely repair stopped that clock while a dealer waited for insurer prior authorization or for ordered parts to arrive. It was still sitting with the House Ways and Means committee when formal sessions ended on 31 July 2026. Advocates in Massachusetts have filed for an extension that would keep the bills alive through the end of the year, and say it could still pass in an informal session.

For readers here, the useful part is not the bill. It is the diagnosis. Two countries, two entirely different funding structures, and the same result: an approval step and a thin service margin standing between a person and a repair that takes an hour to do. That pattern will not be fixed by any single piece of legislation, and it is worth naming clearly the next time someone suggests the wait is just how it goes.

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