Lightweight Wheelchairs
Doe Cayting, co-founder of Wheelchairs of Berkeley, California, says that as a supplier she used to be able to concentrate on what was the best chair for the person, and funding was a side issue. These days, Cayting is concerned that Medicare ceilings are having too much influence on the design of chairs.
Medicare has established very specific ceilings for what it is willing to pay for a wheelchair. Unfortunately, it is usually an amount far lower than what your ideal chair will cost, particularly from a dealer who invests a lot of time in identifying the right chair, supplying you with trial chairs, and working hard to get it configured for you when it arrives. As of this writing, Medicare will not even let you pay additional money to make up the difference, although legislative efforts are trying to change this. You must accept the chair they are willing to buy, or they will not cover you. A wheelchair falls into the category of durable medical equipment (DME) and is often a target of cost controllers in these agencies. They tend to look for the ''biggest ticket'' items, and try to control spending there. Wheelchairs might seem like just the place to try to save some money, but in fact DME represents only about one percent of total health care spending. But when a cost controller sees a request for a $15,000 transit wheelchair, it looks like a good place to control spending, and you might find you will have to fight for approval. |
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