It took Casey Moore, who relies on his power wheelchair, four months to get it repaired in 2023—and six months, from 2024 to this year, more recently.
“It’s this hiccup in my whole life,” said Moore, who works with Oregon Spinal Cord Injury Connection. “I had to use this junk chair, waiting on a simple part that, if I had access to it, I could have been back up and rolling within the week.”
In a 2022 survey by the consumer advocacy network PIRG, 40 percent of wheelchair users reported waiting 7 weeks or longer for repairs—more than seven weeks of lost mobility and autonomy.
Power wheelchairs in the United States are under the control of a duopoly, the subject of a 2022 Mother Jones article by Paul Roberts. The firms, National Seating & Mobility and Numotion, are both owned by private equity investors; each boasts an estimated annual revenue of over $400 million. Responding to Roberts in 2022, both firms acknowledged delays but argued that speedy repair was the norm—and, in Numotion’s case, contended that repairs were unprofitable. (Neither firm replied to a request for comment for this article.)
A strong right to repair law, “should require the manufacturer to provide… access to all the parts, tools and information you need to conduct the repairs.”
Many of those repairs could be performed by outside technicians, or users themselves—but, as a rule, the firms won’t sell the necessary parts, forcing most consumers to go straight to them for support.
That’s led to a proliferation of state-level campaigns for the right to repair: laws designed to prevent monopolies on maintenance, limiting manufacturers’ power to permanently lock customers in for repairs and regular service. Imagine not being able to go to a neighborhood mechanic, electrician, or locksmith: similar binds have sparked right-to-repair movements for everything from consumer electronics to farm equipment, beginning as early as the 1950s with a Justice Department finding that IBM held an illegal monopoly on business computer repairs.
Various right-to-repair laws have now either passed or been introduced in all 50 states, with movements in the 2010s extending to a wider range of electronics and appliances. In 2013, the Repair Association, which includes PIRG, was founded to push for right-to-repair laws, and led a coalition campaign for the right to repair personal electronics. For consumers, such laws push back against tech and industrial corporations that increasingly count on products breaking (or just becoming obsolete) as part of their business model.
Since 2022, some six states—California, Colorado, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington—have passed strong laws allowing wheelchair users to seek third-party or DIY repairs (some laws, like California’s, apply only to power wheelchair users). Many of those campaigns involved some assistance from PIRG, supporting local activists on the ground.
Without such laws, advocates argue, companies that sell durable medical equipment like wheelchairs are under no real timeline to help their customers get back to rolling through life. “It doesn’t cost the state any money to pass this bill and just empower people with disabilities to make decisions on their own,” Moore said.
A strong right-to-repair law, said Nathan Proctor, PIRG’s right-to-repair campaign manager, “should require the manufacturer to provide, on fair and reasonable terms, access to all the parts, tools and information you need to conduct the repairs.”
No national bill in Congress has focused on the right to repair wheelchairs specifically, but Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote in October to the Department of Health and Human Services that they were “especially concerned by the problems wheelchair users face, which are emblematic of challenges related to PE [private equity] involvement in the health care industry more broadly.”
“Currently,” the senators wrote, “wheelchair users seeking to repair their equipment face significant barriers as a result of a wheelchair supply market that is largely controlled by two PE-owned companies—National Seating and Mobility and Numotion—which fail to provide adequate support for timely repairs.”
In addition to corporate lobbying, right-to-repair advocates face challenges from the National Coalition for Assistive & Rehab Technology, a nonprofit group representing suppliers and manufacturers of Complex Rehab Technology, acknowledges that slow wheelchair repairs are an endemic problem but argues, in part, that “power wheelchairs should be serviced by professionals who are familiar with and properly trained to address the intricacies of their products”—namely, professionals associated with the power wheelchair duopoly.
In 2025 alone, New York’s state Senate unanimously passed the Consumer Wheelchair Repair Bill of Rights Act, while Florida’s state House unanimously passed the Repair of Motorized Wheelchairs Act. (A similar bill introduced in Alabama died in committee.)
New York state Sen. Patricia Fahy, who chairs the body’s Disabilities Committee, introduced that state’s legislation after working to pass a right-to-repair law for electronics. With New York’s 2025 legislative session over, the bill can’t enter law until next year, but Fahy told me she was willing to alter the bill if it meant getting it passed and signed next year.
“I don’t want to spend 10 years on this,” Fahy said. “When I did right-to-repair on electronics, we made so many changes in an effort to break the dam.”
It took two sessions for Washington’s state legislature to pass a right-to-repair bill that included wheelchairs, said Marsha Cutting, a wheelchair user and Washington resident who was closely involved in that fight. Cutting, who said she had a wheelchair scrapped as a result of repair errors by one of the wheelchair duopoly firms, said the bill first died in 2024, then stalled in the state House the following year, only passing after prolonged legislative back-and-forth this year.
Still, Cutting said, “We kind of have the best bill, because we managed to pass it without any amendments,” covering almost all possible types of mobility devices.
In Iowa, which has a more limited right to repair for wheelchair users, state Rep. Josh Turek—a wheelchair user and former account manager for Numotion—said he was disheartened by the challenges power wheelchair users, such as those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, faced when trying to get repairs.
Matthew Clark, a wheelchair user, calls right to repair wheelchair laws a “stop-gap solution.”
“On a daily basis, we were inundated with the amount of denials and delays for wheelchairs and also wheelchair repairs,” said Turek, who may mount a Senate campaign. “These are folks that don’t have time for that kind of delay.”
In Iowa, as in many other states, power wheelchair users on Medicaid needed a doctor’s in-person prescription for repairs; in 2024, Turek put forward a bill to end that practice. Although it passed the state House unanimously, Iowa’s state Senate didn’t take it up.
“The Iowa Senate is a conundrum,” Turek said. “Tribalism is really set in thick there, where they don’t want to vote for even a good idea if it’s a Democrat idea.” Regardless, the state’s Department of Health and Human Services still implemented Turek’s proposal in July 2024.
A central argument against wheelchair right-to-repair laws, as with other such laws, is that users cannot be trusted to fix their own wheelchairs correctly. But many disabled wheelchair users, undeterred, have been doing just that—even where the law is against them.
Matthew Clark, who lives in Washington state, got his first wheelchair in preschool. Clark’s dad worked with him to fix it at home—long before 2025, when Washington passed its right-to-repair law—so that “learning wheelchair maintenance was just part of my everyday life,” he said. Even so, Clark calls right-to-repair laws a “stopgap solution.”
“If all things are equal,” Clark said, “I would much rather have my insurance pay [and not] have to pay out of pocket.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.