Page 14 - Mobility Management, June 2017

mm beat: perspectives
place. People are afraid to say that. They seem afraid
to defend their position as professionals and push back against policies, that 10 or 12 years after implementation, still prevent people from getting their mobility interven- tion in a timely fashion.
If Current Events Continue
I go back to the mid ‘60s, when I was helping my uncle, to the late ‘60s, when I started doing stuff around town with people with disabilities. In the ‘70s when I was in Southern California, I was a carpenter and I would fix stuff for kids at USC, and then up north at Berkeley. I witnessed the birth of the independent living movement.
As an ATP that’s aging, we’re all only temporarily able bodied. What scares me the worst is some incompetent fool coming into a nursing home to provide me with equipment that is competitively bid and will do more harm than good. You’re watching an industry circle the drain so slowly and so painfully, and yet the promise of technology on every other end is so fascinating. We’re just being stifled on what we can do. The costs are being
accelerated by the process, not the product. We’re really not a very big industry, and we are just regulated into almost paralysis.
ATP apathy: It’s time and fear. A lot of people are afraid of the legislative process. There are two levels of political representation: Those who can afford to go to an event and those who can’t. There are free ways of doing it, too. You can go onto somebody’s campaign Web site and find out where they’re doing a little coffee talk in the morning at some senior citizens’ center. I always say to people: Grab somebody, take them out to breakfast and go to this thing. You get to meet the boss, you get to meet the representative. They’re still human beings: They still set their alarm, go to bed, get up and put their slippers on just like you do. Say to them: “I need your help.”
On the Simon Margolis Coins He Had at ISS
I had them made. That’s a military thing. When my son went off to war in Afghanistan, I got a Ranger coin. My son has been back for three
or four years, so it’s been in my pocket forever.
Now I carry two. I carry that one and the coin for Simon. To me, it’s just a really cool
way to memorialize somebody. I’m really an emotional person, and when I’m close to somebody, I like to keep them close to me. I keep that in my pocket because we were close as personal friends and professional friends, and then our industry. That coin represents a lifetime in the industry.
On that Famous Metaphor, Often Cited by Margolis, About Hot Dogs & Funding
The hot dog cart was my original. What started that
was an old Italian gentleman on the corner of 34th and 1st Avenue. He was short and stocky with big, working hands. And he and I became friendly because I like dirty-water hot dogs, and he’d be there every April till October. One day I said, “How can you make a living doing this?” He said, “I come out here April to October. I make about $90,000 to $100,000, and then I go to Boca Raton and sell ice from October to the middle of March, take a couple of days off and come back here. I sell the ice and make another $20,000 to $30,000. It’s good.”
The guy was making $125,000 a year selling hot dogs from 11 in the morning till 3 in the afternoon. No post- payment audits, no extrapolated recovery, no seven- element order, no five-element order.
That’s the hot dog cart origin, and Simon kind of adopted it. We thought so much alike. m
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