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BOSTON (State House News Service) — All wheelchairs sold in Massachusetts would come with a two-year warranty that would cover "loaner" wheelchairs during repair periods, under a bill unanimously passed by the Senate on Thursday.
Advocates from the wheelchair user community gathered in the Senate Reading Room after session and stressed that a broken wheelchair isn't a mere inconvenience, it's a health care problem and a civil rights issue.
Dan Harris, a wheelchair user who works on staff at the Boston Center for Independent Living, called an absence of available loaner chairs a repeated "sticking point" whenever his motorized chair has needed work.
"Without the use of my power chair, I can't leave my apartment safely, I can't go to my job safely ... If someone was to provide a loaner chair, a lot of these things would be fixed, at least in the interim," Harris said, calling the Senate's proposed requirement a "gamechanger."
Manufacturers and dealers would either provide a loaner or reimburse the user for leasing one if a wheelchair is out of commission while under repair, under the bill sponsored by Sen. John Cronin (S 2546). That would be mandated within four or eight days, depending on the level of customization of the chair.
"Think as if your car broke down and you couldn't rent a car," said Chris Hoeh, a Boston resident who serves on the Personal Care Attendant Workforce Council. "Well, you can't get out of bed. And then if you can't get out of bed, not only is it emotionally despairing, but physically people get skin breakdown, then they have to go to the hospital where they'll spend weeks, months, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Former Sen. Barbara L'Italien, who now works as executive director of the Disability Law Center, also compared the situation to a broken-down automobile.
"No one else would put up with, if their car broke and they were stranded, and they weren't able to get a phone call through or a reliable fix date, or be told you have to come physically to a place to get it fixed -- when, clearly, if your wheelchair is out of order, oftentimes you can't even leave your residence," the Andover Democrat said, calling wheelchair warranty reforms "a real civil rights issue."
House cosponsor Rep. Jim O'Day said "my colleagues on the House side have to follow suit."
"I guess that's the best thing that I can say today. We will work to follow suit," the West Boylston Democrat said.
Cronin said during the session that the measure "at its core" is a consumer protection bill for constituents who "rely on wheelchairs for their mobility, for their independence, and to live with dignity."
"The market today in Massachusetts is broken, and we can and we must do better," the Fitchburg Democrat said. "This bill aims to expand consumer protections to ensure broken wheelchairs are, one, assessed, and two, fixed in a timely manner."
Disability Policy Consortium Executive Director Colin Killick said the idea for the bill stemmed from comments in forums about health care barriers, about how "broken wheelchairs were a major health care problem to people."
"And the more we dug into it, the more folks from our community had to say about all the ways the system doesn't work -- and the flimsier the excuses for why these problems couldn't be fixed were," he said.
Wheelchair service providers would also need to diagnose repair issues in a "reasonable" three to seven days, Cronin said, and grant automatic preapproval or preauthorization for repairs of less than $1,000. He said the attorney general's office would have enforcement power of the new requirements.
"The company for a large region with thousands of people that use chairs, I was just told they have two technicians to come to people's homes. It's an outrage. This legislation helps us," Hoeh said.
Written by Sam Doran/SHNS
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