[floxy]

>an usual electric wheelchair costs about $65,000

Can you go into what that statement means? I'm having a hard time parsing "an usual". Seems like there are some electric wheelchairs for ~$2,000:

https://www.forbes.com/health/accessibility/best-electric-wh...

...maybe some specialized wheelchairs cost considerably more?

[serf]

none of those chairs in that article is realistically a full-time use electric chair; they're more akin to 'adult scooters' than that. The purpose of most of the chairs in the article linked is to make ease of travel easier; that's why they mostly all fold.

Here's an example of a real full-time use electric chair. [0] It's front wheel drive, has standard attachment points for medical devices, a standardized controller interface that can be adapted to just about anyone, false bogey-arm suspension for stability sake, and all the certs.

It starts around 8k-ish out of pocket. I don't use electric chairs myself, so i'm unfamiliar with what insurance/medicare costs would be.

I pay ~2-4k out of pocket for a manual wheelchairs 20% co-pay through medicare, to give an example of the costs of things. Electric full-time use chairs are astronomically more expensive.

[0]: https://rehab.invacare.com/Power-Mobility/Invacare-AVIVA-FX-...

[tyingq]

It's a complex set of sub-markets. Like, for example, if your kid has one...it has to be NHSTA crash test certified to put on a school bus.

Or, for people with very limited mobility, they need very special cushioning to avoid bedsore type problems.

Just 2 examples, there are many more. Though $65k still strikes me as unusual.

[lagniappe]

Some folks in europe have a hard time knowing when to use a or an because there are so many exceptions, (a before consonant, an before open vowel sound) particularly in areas that pronounce it as oo-sual and not you-shual.