The Market Decides Who Moves: Wheelchairs, Capital, and the Bipartisan Betrayal of Disabled People
Two private equity firms control the wheelchair industry—and disabled people are paying the price. This isn’t a policy failure. It’s capitalism doing exactly what it was built to do: decide who moves, and who gets left behind.
Introduction
Whatever happened to that story about the wheelchair industry? The one where two private equity firms—Numotion and National Seating & Mobility—gobbled up nearly every regional provider and left disabled people stranded, waiting weeks or months for basic repairs. It made the news cycle for a moment. A few senators wrote letters. A few articles came out, all headlined like warnings. But now, searching for updates, all I find is silence. No major regulatory action. No reversal of the mergers. No protections for the people left housebound by broken equipment. The industry remains a duopoly, and the problem has simply... settled in. This isn’t an anomaly. It’s not a case of slow bureaucracy. It’s the system working exactly as it was built to—quietly, efficiently, devastatingly. Disabled people, especially those of us poor, autistic, chronically ill, or multiply marginalised, live in a world where waiting is constant. Waiting to be believed. Waiting to be approved. Waiting for mobility. And behind that wait, always, is someone making money. There’s a grim clarity in realising no one came to fix this—not because they forgot, but because they never planned to. This wasn’t an oversight. It was a market decision.
The Duopoly That Decides Who Moves
Numotion and National Seating & Mobility—those names might not mean much if you’ve never had to fight for a working wheelchair. But for those who rely on mobility aids, they are the two gates through which nearly everything must now pass. They didn’t rise through innovation or care. They’re the result of private equity buyouts—when investment firms, with no interest in disability or access, scoop up essential service providers to extract as much profit as possible. Private equity isn’t about building sustainable businesses. It’s about buying companies, cutting costs, raising prices, and flipping them for profit. It’s short-termism in its purest form, and it’s quietly taken over everything from housing to healthcare. Now it’s come for wheelchairs. These firms have swallowed smaller, local providers across the country, creating what is effectively a duopoly. And the results are exactly what you’d expect from an industry controlled by financial engineers rather than people who care about mobility: delayed repairs, inaccessible service lines, a preference for high-margin replacements over simple fixes, and no accountability. What used to be a matter of care is now a matter of quarterly returns. Wheelchair users become line items. Mobility becomes a product you must qualify for, beg for, and then wait to access. And all the while, the question of who gets to move through the world—on what terms, and at what cost—is quietly decided by people who will never sit in the chairs they profit from.
No One Will Save Us: Biden, Trump, RFK Jr.
No one is coming to save us—not Biden, not Trump, and certainly not RFK Jr. The consolidation of the wheelchair industry into the hands of two private equity-backed giants didn’t happen in the shadows, nor did it occur overnight. It unfolded in plain sight, during a Democratic administration that claimed to champion equity and access. There were hearings, strongly worded letters, fleeting media coverage. But no action. No regulation. No challenge to the financial interests now dictating whether disabled people can leave their homes. And whilst Trump’s record on disability rights is abysmal, the prospect of his return—or of RFK Jr., who peddles ableist conspiracies dressed up as medical scepticism—offers no relief. If anything, it promises an even more brutal landscape: one of deregulation, privatisation, and a total gutting of what little oversight remains.
But the deeper truth is this: it wouldn’t matter who was in office. Because this isn’t about party. It’s about power. Both Democrats and Republicans bow to capital. They may differ in tone, in who they perform empathy for, but their economic loyalties are aligned. They protect investors, not the public. They regulate working-class bodies, not corporate ones. The system doesn’t malfunction when it lets private equity take over life-saving industries. It functions exactly as intended. That’s the point. This country has never prioritised disabled lives—it has only ever managed us, contained us, and, where profitable, exploited us. And when we are no longer profitable, we are made to disappear—off the bus, out of the workforce, behind closed doors waiting for a repair that never comes.
This is not a matter of voting harder. It’s not a matter of writing to the right official. It is a matter of naming, clearly and without apology, that this system does not serve us because it was never designed to. It was built to protect capital—and it does that very well.
Public Opinion Doesn’t Matter (And It Never Did)
Public opinion doesn’t shape policy in the United States—and it never really did. That’s not a cynical take; it’s an empirically supported fact. The landmark 2014 study by political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analysed two decades of policy decisions and found that the preferences of ordinary Americans have essentially no statistical impact on whether policies are adopted. Instead, what reliably predicts policy outcomes is what economic elites and business interests support. In other words, the louder the people shout, the less they are heard—unless their views happen to align with those already in power.
This is not a recent failing or a gradual erosion of democracy. It is the intended design. The U.S. Constitution is often romanticised as a beacon of freedom, but in truth, it was crafted explicitly to prevent direct democracy. The Senate was established to buffer elite interests from populist demands. The Electoral College was a hedge against mass participation. The entire architecture of American governance was built by and for propertied white men—men who feared the “tyranny” of majority rule more than the tyranny of wealth. To this day, the filibuster, gerrymandering, the disproportionate power of small states, and lifetime judicial appointments all serve to insulate decision-making from the will of the people. This is not a bug. It is the blueprint.
And yet, the American public is relentlessly gaslit into believing otherwise. We are taught that this is the greatest democracy on earth, that change comes through patience, civility, and the vote. We are told, over and over, that the system works—even as it works against us. Even as our basic needs go unmet. Even as billionaires set policy behind closed doors whilst the rest of us queue for broken wheelchairs and ration insulin. It takes an enormous propaganda machine—reinforced through media, education, and bipartisan platitudes—to maintain the illusion that participation equals power. But for many of us, especially disabled people, that illusion collapses quickly.
Disabled people are among the most disenfranchised in this country—not just politically, but structurally. Many live below the poverty line, excluded from stable work by inaccessible labour markets and punitive benefit systems. Others are institutionalised or homebound, cut off from civic participation altogether. Even for those who can vote, access to polling places, transportation, and basic accommodation is far from guaranteed. And beyond that lies a deeper barrier: policy indifference. The issues that define disabled life—healthcare, housing, mobility, survival—are rarely addressed meaningfully because our needs are not profitable and our voices are not heard. We are inconvenient to capital, and so we are invisible to governance.
When people ask why no one fixed the wheelchair industry, why the government hasn’t stepped in to stop the abuse, the simplest answer is this: we do not matter to them. Not because they’re unaware. But because our suffering does not threaten the system. It sustains it.
This Is Not New: America Was Built to Serve Capital
This isn’t new. It’s not a crisis of modern governance, nor a slow decline from some imagined golden age of democracy. The United States was never built to serve the people—it was built to serve capital. From its inception, it was a settler project rooted not in liberty, but in commerce. Thirteen colonies, each a corporate charter. Land seized, labour enslaved, profits extracted. The mythology says freedom; the architecture says investment.
If there’s a historical analogue to today’s private equity firms—those faceless entities that now control everything from housing to healthcare to the wheelchair industry—it’s the British East India Company. A private enterprise with state-like powers, the EIC ran vast swathes of territory, enforced monopolies, and crushed resistance with military force. The so-called Boston Tea Party wasn’t a rebellion against taxation—it was a revolt against a state-backed corporate monopoly. And for those who challenged the Company’s power, the punishments were brutal. Imprisonment. Execution. Economic ruin. Today, the means are quieter—but no less coercive. Whistleblowers face blacklisting. Disabled people who resist are surveilled, penalised, cut off from services. Those who disrupt the flow of capital—by organising, by refusing, by surviving—are dealt with.
Private equity is the East India Company of the present era. It doesn’t fly a flag or deploy redcoats, but it moves with the same entitlement, the same disregard for human cost. It buys its way into essential services, extracts value, and leaves the wreckage for the public to manage. It owns the buildings we live in, the clinics we attend, the mobility aids we rely on. And when the profits are drained, it exits—leaving systems hollowed out and people trapped inside them.
The role of the state isn’t to restrain capital—it’s to clear the path for it. The state isn’t a check on corporate power; it’s an extension of it. Regulatory agencies are underfunded not because of oversight, but because toothlessness is the point. Antitrust laws are still on the books, but enforcement is rare theatre. Politicians perform outrage at hearings, only to attend fundraisers hosted by the very firms they claim to rebuke. This isn’t dysfunction. It’s loyalty. Fidelity to capital. The Department of Justice and the FTC aren’t there to safeguard the public good—they’re there to appear as if they do, whilst quietly making room for deeper corporate entrenchment.
Even new federal entities like the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—framed as watchdogs for accountability—are not tasked with rooting out inefficiency in any meaningful sense. Their real function is twofold: dismantle what little friction remains in the flow of capital, and build digital back doors for mining, monetising, and weaponising public data. Efficiency, in this context, means fewer protections, faster deregulation, and deeper surveillance. It’s not about making government work better for people—it’s about making government disappear as a barrier to profit.
So when we talk about the wheelchair industry—when we ask why it’s become so inaccessible, why repair delays stretch into weeks and months, why no one has intervened—we have to confront a deeper truth: it’s not broken. It’s operating exactly as intended. A system built on corporate rule doesn’t serve the public. It manages the public—cheaply, quietly, and with maximum extractive efficiency. The vulnerable are not overlooked; they are accounted for. And discarded.
Capitalism Prices In Our Suffering
Capitalism doesn’t overlook our suffering—it prices it in. For disabled people, especially those of us who are autistic, chronically ill, multiply marginalised, or all three, the system doesn’t fail us accidentally. It designates us as externalities—costs to be minimised, risks to be managed, problems to be ignored until they interfere with someone else’s profit margins. Our access needs are calculated not as human rights, but as financial liabilities. And so we get what the system determines is “just enough.”
When I first needed to use a cane, my HMO—Kaiser Permanente, a so-called non-profit that regularly posts billions in surplus—gave me one. One cane, off the shelf, no consultation. It was designed for someone no taller than 5’10,” and weighing no more than 180 pounds. I’m 6’7” and at the time, just shy of 300lbs. The cane bent under me. I couldn’t use it safely. But to them, the box had been ticked. “You got a cane.” That’s how this works: not in relationship to actual need, but in relation to policy checklists and minimum cost.
At the time, I had more resources than I do now. And through a strange and winding social connection—someone who knew someone who knew the man who once made weapons for Steven Seagal—I managed to commission a bespoke cane. It’s made of poly-resin, strong enough to hold my weight, and shaped with a custom pistol grip to accommodate my damaged hands from years of violent contact sports. It fits me. It honours what my body actually needs. But that only happened because I had money, time, and access. Without those, I’d have been stuck with the flimsy stick they handed me—because for most of us, that’s the end of the road. That’s the rationing logic of care under capitalism: if it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t matter.
Our pain, our restricted movement, our shortened lifespans—they are not crises in this system. They are acceptable losses. Tolerated outcomes. Sometimes, even desirable ones. Because the fewer demands we make, the cheaper we are to manage. That’s why mobility aids aren’t protected as rights, but repackaged as investment opportunities. It’s why repairs get delayed, replacements get denied, and profits keep climbing. Wheelchairs aren’t framed as freedom—they’re framed as product lines. And when the market decides who moves, the rest of us are expected to stay still, stay silent, and accept whatever we’re handed.
The Way Out: Refusal and Solidarity
There is no electoral solution to this. No candidate is coming to rescue us from the grip of private equity. No bill, no bipartisan compromise, no charismatic leader is going to unseat the market logic that determines whether we walk, roll, or are left behind. This is not a matter of policy tweaks or better messaging. It’s a matter of refusing the terms we’ve been given—and choosing solidarity over survivalism.
We need a disability justice movement rooted not in pity or charity, but in collective refusal. Refusal to be grateful for broken aids. Refusal to accept that our movement is too expensive, too complex, too unworthy of design. Some of this resistance is already taking form—in community bike shops that have begun learning how to repair manual chairs, in mutual aid groups that crowdsource equipment or build ramps when no one else will. These are acts of survival, yes—but also of imagination. They say: we know how to care for each other, even when the system won’t.
But the truth is, when it comes to powered mobility devices, the picture is far more complicated. Proprietary software, locked batteries, obscure serial-numbered parts—all deliberately designed to prevent repair and ensure dependence on the original supplier. The same firms that dominate the chair market also control the supply chains, gatekeeping everything from motors to joysticks. Want to fix your chair yourself? Good luck. Want to use a third-party part? Warranty voided. It’s a digital enclosure wrapped around your body, and it’s defended with the full force of capital.
And yet, we must still imagine more. Why aren’t college engineering departments designing open-source mobility aids? Why don’t public libraries lend repairable chairs like they do books and tools? Why is access a product, not a public good? These questions are not rhetorical. They are the seeds of something else—a world where mobility is not mediated by hedge funds, where movement is not a matter of market value.
The way out begins when we stop asking how to fix the current system and start building systems that were never meant to profit from our pain. That work already exists—in whispers, in workshops, in shared schematics, in acts of mutual aid. It needs amplification, not permission. Not reform, but revolution. Because we are not problems to be solved. We are people. And we deserve to move.
Final thoughts …
This was never a glitch. The delays, the denials, the broken chairs and missing parts—these aren’t signs of a system in crisis. They are signs of a system doing exactly what it was built to do. The market decides who moves. It decides who gets access, who gets repairs, who gets seen. And everyone else? We wait. We suffer. We disappear into the margins—unprofitable, inconvenient, undeserving.
But we are not the broken ones. The sickness is the system. The cruelty is not accidental; it’s economic. Capitalism doesn’t malfunction when it extracts from our bodies, it thrives. And it can’t be reformed. You can’t patch up a system designed to discard us and call it care. There was a time before capitalism, and there will be a time after it. The question is whether we choose to build that future—or wait for it to be denied to us, one repair delay at a time.
We don’t need more apologies from politicians or more promises from corporations. We need to stop asking this system to recognise our worth. It never will. What we need—what we already have, in scattered places—is resistance. Refusal. Solidarity. The quiet, powerful insistence that we deserve to move, to live, to build something better. Not someday. Now.