Wheelchair Users Look To House For Relief

Leyla Connolly's battery-powered wheelchair has been broken for over a year. As she waits for it to be fixed, she is consigned to her Dorchester apartment, where she feels trapped without a safe way to leave to get groceries, go to doctor's appointments or visit the nearby park.

"My whole life has been on standstill for a year," Connolly said.

The Senate has twice passed a bill (S 2541) to expand wheelchair warranty protections and require faster repairs and replacements. The House left the bill untouched last session and this session representatives have not taken action, with formal meetings set to end July 31.

Rep. John Lawn, the House chair of the Health Care Financing Committee, held a closed-door negotiation meeting in April with disability rights advocates and wheelchair repair companies, trying to come up with compromise language to put before the House, according to a handful of advocates familiar with the conversations.

"I've appreciated the engagement of the committee in working to understand and facilitate conversations," said Chris Hoeh, a wheelchair user and disability rights advocate who attended the meeting. "They could have just taken the Senate legislation and buried it, or rewritten it and done a compromise that was really bad for us. But they gave us time to try and negotiate. And now, I'm looking forward to working with them to get it to the governor's desk."

Lawn's office did not respond to several attempts to get in touch about the status of the wheelchair repair bill.

"On one side of the ledger, we have low-income wheelchair users who are stranded in their homes. On the other side we have two private equity companies, one who netted $55 million last year and other $90.5 million," said Rick Glassman, director of advocacy at the Disability Law Center. "So there are adequate resources to provide adequate service. But the priorities of private equity are, unfortunately, elsewhere. So we rely on state government to try to level the playing field for customers."

The companies Glassman referred to, Numotion and National Seating & Mobility, run all seven wheelchair supply shops in Massachusetts.

"Inadequate insurance reimbursement policies for wheelchair repairs further incentivize companies to prioritize profitable service lines, such as sales, while cutting spending on less profitable service lines, like technician staffing and training," says a 2023 study by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project on private equity in medical equipment, focused on Numotion and NSM.

Wayne Grau, the executive director for the national organization of wheelchair providers including Numotion and NSM, the National Coalition for Assistive and Rehab Technology, declined to comment.

The version of the bill that passed through the Senate this year would require every wheelchair sold or leased in Massachusetts to come with at least a two-year warranty. During the warranty period, manufacturers would be required to provide a remote assessment for a defective wheelchair within three business days and an in-person assessment four business days after that. If an individual needs a temporary loaner wheelchair, the manufacturer would also have to provide one within a few days.

This bill would catch Massachusetts up with other states, Glassman said.

Rhode Island and Connecticut require two-year warranties for wheelchairs. Massachusetts currently has a law requiring manufacturers to provide warranties to some individuals, but it is limited in scope. It only mandates a year-long warranty, doesn't apply to all wheelchairs, and there are no current requirements on how quickly manufacturers must respond.

Connecticut last month passed a bill that made it the first state in the country to mandate a 10-business day repair deadline after a wheelchair user reports an issue. Other states, such as Colorado, California, Oregon, Alabama, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, North Dakota, and Ohio have laws requiring companies to provide comparable loaner chairs for those whose devices are getting repaired.

"Why aren't customers in Massachusetts entitled to the same thing?" Glassman said.

Connolly said she has had consistent trouble getting in touch with the repair shop fixing her battery powered chair, and has been left with only a manual chair in the meantime. Last she heard, the company told her they had to wait for MassHealth and her doctor to approve payments for the parts that need to be replaced, over a year after she brought it in to be fixed.

"I took my manual wheelchair to go grocery shopping, but because of the extra weight, when I was trying to get back up the hill to my apartment I flipped backwards. I almost got hit by a bus," Connolly said. "I cannot get out of my house in that wheelchair. Can't even get to the doctors. And it's too hot now to push myself up and down the hills, I feel like I can't breathe."

Barbara L'Italien, former representative and executive director of the Disability Law Center, said the bill -- now stuck in Health Care Financing -- has already been through several committees, and she's hopeful that it will get passed this session.

"We have been involved in negotiations at multiple levels, with Consumer Protection a session ago, Senate Ways and Means, and now Health Care Financing. These protections already take place in other states, there's no reason they couldn't here," she said. "People in wheelchairs, their only leverage is through the state, so we're really hoping they will see this as an important civil rights issue."