These wheelchairs are custom built to your dimensions. They're not adjustable one-size-fits-all ones.

There's another article by the same author about their quest to get a custom titanium chair paid for by their insurance - https://newmobility.com/finding-the-right-wheelchair/

It's really interesting to learn about all the variables that make a good chair - pressure distribution, the seat height, castor width, centre of gravity and other geometry variables. And all of those are unique to your body.

According to other comments here, a custom titanium chair costs about $4k, so $1k is cheap compared to that.

You are missing the experience of being tied to a wheelchair for a complete day.

None of the chairs you have shown are suitable for daily use. Even the "Magnesium" one.

One of the most important point (beside being the right size) is to be able to move the center of the rear wheels just behind the center of gravity. Too far rear and you have very good stability (hospital chairs), but you need to use most of your strength just to be able to turn (and you take a lot of space for turning). Too far ahead and it becomes dangerous. So it must be adjustable. In theory this should be possible on a cheap wheelchair, but I have never seen it. Probably the weight ditribution is too different (most is on the rear wheel) that the chassis must be thought differently?

I don’t know much about wheelchairs but I watched the video in the article and by the looks of it these are a certain class of wheelchair and they don’t look comparable to what you’ve linked to. My guess is photos are deceiving and there’s a handful of features worth having if you spend your waking moments in one of these things. The reviewer in the video mentioned some features he liked and disliked, wheels specifically can be a huge factor and tend to be expensive upgrades

My first kagi result also shows many options below AUD $1000 (USD $700 or so):

https://www.buywheelchair.com.au/

I suspect it's like anything in the US - despite much of the global research being done there at taxpayer expense, Americans seem to get screwed over on anything health or medicine related. And they continue to argue that their health system is a good one, for some weird Stockholm Syndrome-esque reason I suppose.

I would assume the wheelchairs I linked above are made in China and anyone enterprising could import them for < $500 USD per unit. I also assume their insurance cartel would have an argument why they're not suitable, despite being suitable for the other 7.8B people in the world.

The 3 things you're missing are:

1) How uncomfortable lower end chairs can be for their users

2) How many of the little design decisions in lower end chairs can add up to a lot of pain

3) The chairs you buy online are almost exclusively all made in China using Chinese labor and pricing, where as the one in the linked article is made in the US paying US wages

But I want to talk about 1 and 2 for a moment. My spouse has developed a need for a wheel chair from time to time, so we originally bought a cheap one, just like many of the ones listed there. Specifically we bought one of these Drive chairs for about $140 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008KMKVEK/).

Among the small "papercuts" of using this thing:

* It was extremely uncomfortable after an hour or so. Bringing extra cushions and padding was a must

* The bearings were pretty awful and there was quite a bit of rolling resistance

* After enough times being transported folded up in a trunk, the plastic wheels deformed enough that one side rubbed on the frame every rotation. Not enough to make it unusable, but enough to add even more rolling resistance, in addition to requiring constant adjustments to keep going straight

* Misc bolts and pieces on the frame would catch and lock with each other making un-folding or folding the chair unexpectedly complex at random times

* 41 lbs is a LOT of extra weight to be rolling around with just your arms when you're already trying to roll yourself along.

* There was so much slop in the frame, rolling over any uneven surfaces was an exercise in frustration at best. Everything moved and shifted and your balance was all over as things twisted and buckled under any surface that was a completely flat linoleum hospital floor. In fact the thing that finally did the chair in was a trip to a park where we needed to be rolling over the grass and roots and dirt. A twist too far going over a rough patch of ground broke some of the pieces that hold everything together.

It was a perfectly serviceable chair for an occasional need that lasted us about 4 years of light duty use (some of which was during COVID, so very light duty in some cases). And when we replaced it, we never even considered buying the same one. It wasn't worth the money saved. It's hard to really describe, but all the little pain points made it so that in many ways the chair felt more limiting than the medical condition itself. And we were and are extremely fortunate that we're still able to decide on a case by case basis whether to use or not use the chair. If it was something we had to use every day, all day, I would wager by the end of the first month we would have been looking for something else, and it might have lasted a whole year before breaking.

it seems to be similar with hearing aids. I recently saw a video explaining that the new airpods will be usable as hearing aids. the video went on to explain that this will make them great value for deaf people as hearing aids can run into the thousands of dollars. I just checked and you can get hearing aids in my country for less than $100. so what's going on?

I'm guessing this is either a non-problem, i.e. the expenses are being exaggerated by competitors; or it's some kind of private healthcare thing where everything is insanely expensive because the government doesn't negotiate prices centrally

Same in France (literally the first Google link): https://monfauteuilroulant.com/Fauteuils-Roulants/Fauteuil-r...

It looks like a US specific problem.