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How can I say this? It's not profitless. It is artificially degraded downward from a standard and superficially enhanced upward. Both directions are motivated by profit, and more than likely serious marketing analysis has gone on to determine how many of which kind of chair to produce. Judging from the variations at the bottom, I would assume there is more profit in the degraded chairs. They can sell more of them, because there are more poor disabled people than rich disabled people. The prices for these things are completely insane. The bottom range is between about 5-6k, mid-range 7-10k, with the top between 15-25k
The contrast only shows up over time. Fifteen years ago, there were no class distinctions between power chairs. They were all about the same price (3-5k, with extensive but needed modification up to 10k), with the same options, modifications, performance, reliability and breakdown rate. Whether you were rich and could buy anything or poor and on state welfare, you got pretty much the same sort of equipment. It varied only with the extent of the disability, not with the coverage. With the rise of the HMOs and the shifting of state and federal benefits over to private insurance systems, the chairs changed to a tiered system of equipment offerings completely contingent on coverage with little attention to the extent of the disability.
But the comparison to universities is relevant.
On a fluke I took my kid to a fancy BBQ out in Danville for prospective undergraduate applicants to MIT. It was very nice, very large, very rich house with about hundred people. They had current graduate students and a couple of faculty doing orientation and conversational or informal pre-application interviews, `scoping' out the talent. I did my best to cover my rat-fuck attitudes, dress `up' to `casual', smiled a lot, was extremely pleasant (which I loath).
I was doing my own scoping. Was MIT worth whatever outrageous tuition they wanted back then---something near 20k in 1990 (now 29-34k)? Not for chemistry and math it wasn't. That got to be pretty clear, once you pestered the grad students about their own work a little. What they were really selling were `connections' to high tech business management---mostly access to the soon to bloom `High Tech Bubble'. They had just about zero interest in science and engineering.
UCB at that time was just about ready to take the great leap downward under Wilson's Draconian budget cuts, but UC hadn't crashed yet. So, the kid went to school up the street for about 2k a year, i.e 1/10th. Pretty obnoxious even at that, considering I put myself through UCB when it was 120 a semester for `student fees.'
My cycling buddy (much richer than me) sent his daughter to Carnegie Mellon (29k per semester). After her first year going over what she learned and comparing it to our own UCB experiences thirty years ago, it was 58k down the toilet. UC Davis, her alternate choice at about 6.2k or a little under 1/10th would have been a better choice.
Chuck Grimes