Motion Mobility and Design

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Our Mission at Motion Mobility & Design is to provide physically challenged residents and their families in the community with the highest quality rehab products and services available in the market so that they may continue to lead an active and independent lifestyle.

Our location at 6490 Promler Street in North Canton, Ohio offers 12,000 square feet of state of the art equipment used in the evaluation, fabrication and repair of all types of Mobility and Lift Equipment. Located right off of Interstate 77 at the Portage Street exit (111), access is easy from anywhere in Ohio.

View full sizeChuck Crow / The Plain DealerJerry Motley, 25, listens as State Rep. Kenny Yuko talks to crowd at the St. Augustine Health Campus in Cleveland on Wednesday about changing a law to help nursing home patients with their medicaid bills. Behind Motley are Ella Patterson and in the Browns hat is William Brown.
A local state lawmaker is trying to change a new Medicaid payment system that has caused companies to close, others to lay off employees and, more alarmingly, is hurting nursing home patients who need services such as ventilators, dialysis or custom wheelchairs.
Included in the state budget last July was a system of "bundling" Medicaid support services. It stopped the practice of billing the government directly for services, such as ambulance transportation, custom wheelchairs, physical therapy and oxygen. Instead, every nursing home automatically got an extra $3.91 per patient per day to pay for the services.
Rep. Kenny Yuko, who introduced a bill with 30 co-sponsors to reverse the bundling, said it has had unintended and troubling consequences, including giving nursing homes authority to make medical and equipment decisions for patients that had been previously made by health care professionals.
View full sizeAPRep. Kenny Yuko, D-Richmond Heights.The bundling was put into place to get more federal funds and help Ohio balance its budget. Because the base amount paid to nursing homes went up, Ohio was able to draw down $55 million more in federal funds. The Medicaid program is funded through state and federal tax dollars.
But rather than have the money Medicaid paid for the support services follow the patients who were getting the care, the state passed out the money using a simple equation -- dividing the annual amount it pays for those services, about $53 million, by the number of Medicaid bed days. The $3.91 per Medicaid patient per day was then given to every nursing home with Medicaid patients.
Nursing homes that have ventilator-dependent patients, dialysis patients needing transport to centers, and severely handicapped patients quickly found that it doesn't cover their costs.
Nor does it cover a $25,000 wheelchair, for example, that 25-year-old Jerry Motley, with a spinal cord injury uses. If something were to happen to the chair which is maneuvered by a mouth stick, it's uncertain if the nursing home where he lives would be able to replace it.
However, nursing homes that don't have those types of special needs patients have benefited financially by the extra payments.
Yuko, who held a news conference Wednesday on the issue, said his bill would be "budget neutral," meaning it would still allow the state to get the extra federal funds by putting prescription drugs into the bundle in place of wheelchairs, oxygen, transportation, physical therapy and other items that were originally included.
The state Medicaid director said the agency didn't have a position on Yuko's proposal yet.
Gov. Ted Strickland's spokeswoman said any change would have to be budget neutral and that they would be reviewing the bill.
Meanwhile, some Ohio nursing homes are refusing to take on more specialized patients, such as those needing dialysis, with Multiple Sclerosis, and ventilator-dependent, representatives from health care groups such as the Ohio Renal Association told those who were at the news conference.
And health care products companies like Miller's Rental & Sales, which specializes in complex wheelchairs for patients in Cleveland, Akron, Canton and Youngstown, have watched their business dwindle.
"We use to do 60 to 80 evaluations a month, now we're down to less than five," said company official John Miller.
Senior Care Services, which works with ventilator-dependent and other patients at 100 nursing homes around the state, including Cleveland, has lost eight customers who can't afford to contract with them and in turn they've laid off employees.
"We had 21, we laid off 11 respiratory therapists," said David T. Marshall, vice president of marketing and sales of the Worthington-based company .
Marshall said he moved back to Ohio from Phoenix seven years ago to start up the business.