Only if they did that there wouldn't be any middle men making rules for who gets denied or which company's products you have to buy, so they would be exposed to competitive pressure and have to make better stuff for slimmer margins. Which the existing system is designed to prevent, because politics.
Honestly, I'll make an insane hot take here: I think historic/antique buildings that can't be made ADA compliant shouldn't be used for anything important. Or rather, that they should be modified to accommodate.
History is important TO A DEGREE. Helping human beings feel more a part of society is more important.
So make one that isn't. There is nothing in them that has to be made out of depleted uranium.
> For another, I would assume they won't work well on irregular stairways or antique stairways.
How is that any worse than the status quo? If you have something that can navigate stairways then it will work on some of the structures which are old and currently inaccessible, as opposed to none of them as it is now.
> Honestly, I'll make an insane hot take here: I think historic/antique buildings that can't be made ADA compliant shouldn't be used for anything important. Or rather, that they should be modified to accommodate.
In many cases this is impossible without taking a wrecking ball to the existing structure and even when it is possible it will commonly be prohibitively expensive because it requires extensive bespoke professional engineering instead of off the shelf commodity products. You're essentially asking for all the old buildings to be torn down, which would not only be the destruction of history but have an extensive economic cost and exacerbate the existing real estate shortage.
It might literally be less expensive to give everyone in a wheelchair a personal flying car.
As others have mentioned: no, it’s the right tack; permanent changes to the built world benefit many and survive whatever byzantine rules might come in place to receiving high-tech wheelchairs from insurance or otherwise.
> permanent changes to the built world
None of that is permanent. Most buildings never make it to 100 years. The real estate consumed is a continuous cost. There is also a massive, ongoing cost to making new construction more expensive, because it increases housing scarcity and transfers wealth to landlords.
> benefit many and survive whatever byzantine rules might come in place to receiving high-tech wheelchairs from insurance or otherwise.
It seems extremely unlikely that in any non-apocalyptic future the technology will cease to be available in the market regardless of how dysfunctional insurance is. The least convenient plausible scenario is that you have to pay money for it. And the entire point is that on net this will be less money than people are having to pay for what's happening now, in the form of high rents.
That would cost money, but how could it possibly cost as much as modifying every building everywhere? A wheelchair ramp is thousands of dollars. An elevator is hundreds of thousands. A person in a wheelchair might encounter a thousand distinct sets of stairs in a year but the median set of stairs doesn't encounter that number of distinct people in a wheelchair.
More importantly, there are stairs in places we're not going to do anything about it, like old buildings and private homes. And there are accessibility devices that become inaccessible, e.g. an elevator that can't be used because the power is out or the building is on fire. A solution that still works in those cases is better.
As far as I can tell we got stuck with the existing one because of politics. The per-person cost of a ramp at a large high volume business is negligible because it has so much traffic, so much so that they'd install one regardless. The real cost is putting them in every small shop and low traffic area. But then you have no opposition from large businesses to a law requiring them because it puts a disproportionate cost on their smaller competitors. Whereas a tax that paid for more capable "wheelchairs" would sensibly be paid mostly by those large companies, and then they object.