Which recovery equipment Medicare pays for — and which has been recalled

Compiled and reviewed by Erin Rose — healthcare price-transparency analyst. Data last rebuilt August 29, 2026.

Medicare publishes what it pays for durable medical equipment. The CPSC and FDA publish what has been recalled. Nobody publishes them together, so nobody can answer the question a patient actually has the week before surgery: is the thing I am about to buy both covered and safe? This page is that join, for the 68 equipment codes that matter during recovery at home. The whole dataset is free to download and reuse.

Three things the join shows that neither source shows alone

1. The one item here that has killed people is one Medicare pays for

Bed side rails are the only equipment in this dataset whose recall narratives name deaths: 13 across six CPSC recalls, every one an adult portable bed rail, with entrapment and asphyxiation as the stated hazard. They carry 35 recall records in total, and the pace is current rather than historical — five of them landed in 2026 alone. Medicare covers them. It billed 20,821 services for the two codes in DY2024, at a purchase fee of $12.31–$22.32 for half-length (E0305) and $129.76–$203.16 for full-length (E0310).

Coverage is not a safety signal. It is a payment category, and this is the clearest case of the two coming apart. If you are borrowing or buying a bed rail secondhand, check the model against CPSC before it goes on the bed.

2. Bath and transfer safety equipment is excluded by statute — and it has been recalled

All 9 bath and transfer codes (E0240–E0248: shower chairs, tub rails, raised toilet seats, transfer benches) show zero national claims and no fee-schedule entry. That is not an oversight and not a quality judgement: bath-safety equipment is excluded from the DME benefit category by statute — Social Security Act §1861(s)(6), the “primarily medical in nature” test. There is no appeal that turns a shower chair into a covered item.

Meanwhile 7 distinct recall records in this dataset cover exactly that equipment — shower and shower/commode chairs from Aquatec, Invacare, ActiveAid and others, all through FDA device recall channels. So the category you must pay for entirely out of pocket is also one where the recall history is worth checking yourself, because no supplier is doing it for you as a condition of billing Medicare.

3. Recall volume does not track how many products exist

It would be reasonable to assume the most-recalled category is simply the one with the most models on the market. It is the opposite here, and the gap is wide.

The folding wheeled walker (E0143) is the busiest item in the dataset — 508,460 services and $24,064,635 in DY2024, across 1,002 distinct products from 103 manufacturers. It carries 17 recall records and no deaths. Bed side rails carry 35 records and 13 deaths from a catalogue of 47 products — a catalogue roughly one twentieth the size.

So the concentration is real and it is not a reporting artifact: a product category about twenty times smaller than walkers produces twice the recalls and all of the deaths. If you take one operational thing from this dataset, it is that adult portable bed rails deserve a model-number check before use in a way a walker does not.

What Medicare spends the most on

What Medicare does not pay for at all

12 of the 68 codes appear in no Medicare fee schedule and recorded no national claims in DY2024. Nine of them are the statutory bath-safety exclusion above. The others are listed here so the absence is legible rather than inferred.

How the join works, and where it is imperfect

A recall attaches to an HCPCS code when one of the search terms the recall was retrieved under appears in that code's CMS long_description as adjacent words, tolerating a plural and at most one intervening word (so the term 'bed rail' reaches CMS's 'Bed side rails'). One intervening word and no more: two would also pull 'bed rail' into 'Hospital bed, ... with any type side rails', and a hospital bed's integrated rails are not what those recalls are about. Derived from the two source files, with no editorial mapping table.

The honest limits, all of which are also stated inside the dataset:

• Utilization is DY2024, published with roughly an 18-month lag.
• Fee ranges are min/max across state non-rural purchase (NU) columns; CMS's national Ceiling/Floor columns read 0.00 for DME and are not usable.
• deaths_mentioned is parsed from CPSC narrative text only and is a floor, not a count.
• 6 of 102 recall records match no code in this 68-code scope — CMS has no code whose description says 'rollator' (it calls them wheeled walkers) or 'lift chair' (it calls them seat lift mechanisms). They are listed in unmatched_recalls, not discarded.
• A recall that matches several codes is counted under each. Sum the recall column and you will double-count: the 41 bed-rail recalls sit under both E0305 and E0310. Distinct totals are in `totals`.

One consequence is worth stating plainly: do not sum the recall column. A recall that matches several codes is counted under each, so the 35 bed-rail records appear under both E0305 and E0310. Distinct totals live in the dataset's totals object, and every figure on this page uses those.

Correction, 29 August 2026

Use it

The dataset is CC BY 4.0. Republish it, chart it, load it into a model, check our arithmetic. The only ask is attribution back to this page so a reader can trace a number to CMS, CPSC and FDA rather than to a summary of a summary. If you find an error, tell us and it gets fixed and noted, not quietly overwritten — see how we verify.