I like this fellow's take on it. Credit to the original author whomever he/she may be:

Call for your free battery powered power chair ! Paid for in full by Medi-Care. Have any of you seen these commercials telling people to call a toll free number for their “free power chair?” How can it be free if in the next sentence these companies make claims that it will cost you “little or no money” and that it is paid for by Medi-Care?

This is yet another slap in the face to the American tax payer. Why? Because its the U.S. tax payer that is footing the bill for this scam on society by telling people that they are free in the first place. So here’s how it works. Some charlatan has this idea to buy these power chairs in bulk wholesale. He then pays for commercial time on television to proclaim to the masses that they are “entitled” (yes, The Scooter Store actually uses the word “entitled”.) to their free power chair. Then they mark these things up 500% and makes a killing un an unsuspecting public.

I actually talked to a rather obese woman at the supermarket yesterday after I overheard her telling the cashier that she had just received one of these $10,000.00 power chairs for free from The scooter place and was proclaiming its greatness. $10,000.00 dollars!!! So I asked her why she needed it in the first place. She said because she has “bad knees.” I almost said to her that perhaps if she lost three hundred pounds she wouldn’t have bad knees.

Which brings me to my next point. It seems that most of the people I see in these power chairs are morbidly obese. So I guess now it has become incumbent of our “compassionate” society to pay for people that have eaten themselves into a such a state of fatness that they can no longer walk on their own. This would mean that essentially its societies fault that they are fat.

What are we doing here? It would occur to me that the last thing you would do to a heroin addict is give them enough “free” heroin to overdose and die. If we were truly a compassionate society we would dupe these obese people into ordering the power chair only to find out upon delivery that in reality they ordered a f*ucking treadmill! Thats right! I said it! A treadmill so they can get the exercise they need and loose the weight! And the contract should read that if they take the treadmill they have to go to a gym and diet as well.

Its the typical convoluted ideology I would expect from the liberal American public at large. Or maybe its because the liberal idiots that allow this nonsense to go on are really hoping to facilitate and early and untimely demise of the morbidly obese. After all for every one American in the hospital for smoking related illnesses there are nine fat people in the hospital for weight related health issues.

It’s sheer lunacy and it pisses me off that they can claim these things are free in the first place. Congress should pass a law that says that EVERYTHING that is call free yet paid for with tax money should have to say at the end of each commercial something like “paid for by the tax payer of the United States of America.” JD

Please forward this on to the author if you get a chance.

I agree. In fact you should have tipped her chair over and beaten her with a Quikie Mop. How dare she?! Far too many handicapped people are getting a free ride in this society. She should have dragged her gimp azz into the store upon bloodied knees if she needed food so bad, which , you in your obviously medically backed opinion, made so clear. I infuriates me to no end that some people need assistance. Survival of the fittest right? If this were the wild, she would have been dinner for a least a handful of lion cubs by now.

When you "actually talked" to this hideous creature, was it hard to hear her through the mouthfuls of food which she must have been shoving in her pie hole with rapid progression? I would have slapped the Ring Dings out of her porky fingers in a fit of blind rage brought on by the wave of tough love and concern for her well being. Bully for you to show such restraint.

You sir are a shining example for all of us.

Obesity is not a handicap. It's a choice. A really bad one too.

The ad is correct. It is an entitlement of their Medicare insurance plan. And it is free "to them" only if they have a secondary private insurance policy that covers the copay portion or they have Medicaid. Medicaid pateients cannot be billed any $!!!!!!
Also, to bill Medicare or Medicaid you have to be an accredited company. Do you know the process for aquiring a scooter/power chair (K12 medicare coding)? You have to have a doctor write a Rx for wheelchair clinic, attent said wheelchair clinic where a physical therapist and a sales rep access pt's abilities and needs. The PT then writes a letter for physician review and attatchment to their paperwork that they then send to Medicare for authorization. At that point the point the equipment is ordered then delivered and fitted to the patient.
Medicare (and every private insurance) has a fee schedule that the providing company has to accept assignment or not. The company does NOT get to pick their price, fyi.
Scooter store/rascal have poor CS and repair is a beeeotch.
As far as the phat azz mixing in a salad? Amen bro.
JB

So does this mean the Slap/Chop is an evil machine?

Just want to know.

We got one of these free chairs for my Grandmother when she was still alive. It wasn't one of the $10,000 models, but one of the much cheaper ones. She wasn't obese, either. Just a little old lady, who used a walker when she was in her 80's. I remember when I was a kid on the farm, she was strong as an Ox & fast as lightning, but arthritis & osteoporosis relegated her to being hunched over & barely able to walk.

She didn't like the scooter, but much preferred me to push her in a wheelchair when we went to the grocery store. After she passed away, I donated it to a lady in her Church who had a very similar situation. She wasn't obese, either.

Bariatric power chairs and chairs with tilt seating systems are where the costs start to rise greatly.
Plus you're not helping him ridicule phatazz's Jet.....

Your case certainly does not fit the description in the story, Jet, so kudos to you and your family for doing the right thing, and utilizing the system as it was intended.

But back to the story...the $10K scooters that ZRX has absolutely no problem paying for out of his hard earned cash so some pig can gorge herself at Walmart to the point of his tax dollars paying for her hospitalization and finally burial since she was a welfare bred WIC baby anyway. Sounds crass doesn't it, ZRX? I find it funny how some of you guys will cry up and down this forum about birth certificates, black kids getting free laptops at school, and state sponsored abortions, but yet when I post a story about a clear and obvious waste of YOUR hard earned tax dollars, you get all sarcastic and anti-whatever. Just pointing that out dude. That's all. Back to the fun...

^ homeslice. That was contex for your rant. You whine, bitch and complain that people don't add to the conversation and I did just that for you. And I didn't state that I was all for it, just gave you facts.
And what if these phatazz's are geneticlly pre-disposed t obesiety? Then will it be like homosexuality and we can make them a protected class instead of ridiculing them?

Can I get one with a V8?

all that aside this is an area in which I beleive Medicare and Medicaid are getting scammed. I also beleive if we ever really take a hard look at fraud and waste in M&M this will be a prime area to look at.

But fat people are cool in my book.

You'd just mix vodka with it and get picked up on a dui.

TW, the profit after accepting Medicare assignment is not good. That is what has propped up mass marketed outfits like "scooter store".
And the "fraud" that occurs (and it does) is easily found when efforts is made. For the most part, the feds focus more on compliance than enforcing offenders.

Agreed

And those commercials are always playing during the Glen Beck Show. Well, those and the "sell all your gold" ads. I'm waiting for Beck's next sponsor to be "send us your Social Security checks, inc"

So you ran out of material, and you're just going to rewind the tape and start in with the same sh*t all over again, eh?

Hey dude, if you don't like scooters and Glen Beck and fat people, take a walk. Get some ass. Hug your kids, if anyone was stupid enough to breed with you. Nobody gives a sh*t what you think. Life's too short. Smoke a bowl. blah blah blah blah blah.

I opened this actually expecting it to be an older post revisited.

The term "pity" only begins to describe my feelings towards our pal dsmokers.

But I am envious of his spare time.
How dull must one's life be to continuously watch a tv program that you hate?

Life.
Get one.

it took me 3 seconds to copy and paste that. I bet it took you longer to type your flame.

Pardon Scooter Libby!