alt Hacker NewsMy former girlfriend gets powered wheelchairs through the Ontario Disability Support Program, and I witnessed and learned that the whole thing is such a fraud.
Her powered chair was just over $20,000 and was a terrible piece of machinery. You were definitely not getting the "medical devices have to be reliable" premium. And any time the technician came out, we got a bill to forward to ODSP for thousands of dollars, even for the simplest fix.
And of course there was zero competition: there was one and exactly one vendor you could go to for this stuff. They were, of course, terrible with customer service, terrible with technician competence, and their products were consistently terrible.
I'm usually instantly skeptical of any tech startup that wants to airdrop into a problem space and disrupt things, but in this case, I'm 38,000% confident that there's something that can be done with this one.
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>And of course there was zero competition: there was one and exactly one vendor you could go to for this stuff. They were, of course, terrible with customer service, terrible with technician competence, and their products were consistently terrible.
It's probably not a cost effective market to be in and getting a government monopoly is the only way to make it viable in the first place.
You had to have cashflow to pay those bills and wait for a redund? Sounds terrifying.