So Every BODY Can Move

Amputees, orthotists, and prosthetists lobby statehouses through the So Every BODY Can Move campaign so insurers must cover running blades, swim legs, and sport orthoses as medically necessary care.

ENABLE Model location

• Navigator-side Compensations → Assert One's Rights
• Navigator-side Compensations → Stage a Protest
• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility

What it is

So Every BODY Can Move (SEBCM) organizes amputees, prosthetists, orthotists, and allied clinicians to win state legislation that forces insurers to cover activity-specific prosthetic and orthotic devices.¹ The American Orthotic and Prosthetic Association (AOPA), the Amputee Coalition, the National Association for the Advancement of Orthotics and Prosthetics (NAAOP), and the American Academy of Orthotists and Prosthetists (AAOP) launched the coalition in 2022 after Maine became the first state to require pediatric coverage of recreational prostheses, and they use that template to press other legislatures.²

The campaign trains disabled advocates to carry bill language into their own capitols, then supports them through committee hearings, press conferences, and governor signings. Amputees assert their rights by testifying in their own names, describing denials they received, and reading the insurance letters that called their running blades or shower legs not medically necessary. Nicole Ver Kuilen's Forrest Stump organization supplies the narrative backbone. Ver Kuilen swam, biked, and ran 1,500 miles down the Pacific Coast on a walking prosthesis after her insurer refused a running blade, and she later moved into the Amputee Coalition to lead SEBCM's national organizing.³

As of April 2026, twelve states have enacted SEBCM laws. Maine signed first in May 2022, followed by Arkansas, Colorado, and New Mexico in 2023, Illinois later in 2023, Maryland and Minnesota in 2024, and Georgia, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington in 2025.⁴⁵ Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas introduced bills for the 2026 session.⁵ The coalition's 28x28 target names twenty-eight state laws by the 2028 Los Angeles Paralympics as the groundwork for federal reform.²

Why it matters

Medicare's 1970s-era functional-level rules built the denial system insurers still quote. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services classify lower-limb prostheses under a K-level scale that sorts amputees from K0 (non-ambulator) to K4 (high-impact athlete), and payers approve devices only up to the level the reviewer grants.⁶ Private carriers adopted the same scale, then used it to deny anything above the level they assigned. Forrest Stump and SEBCM enter this sequence to push state legislatures to write activity back into medical necessity, because the federal agency that built the K-level framework has not rewritten it. When advocates testify that a walking leg tore open their residual limb during a 5K, they contest a definition of medicine that CMS wrote and insurers then sharpened into a revenue control.

Insurance committees and medical directors rarely shift on individual appeals, so the campaign converts single denials into statewide coverage rules. Mahfuz Mahin Dewan's review for Representation in Rehab documents that Black Americans are four times more likely to undergo amputation than non-Hispanic white Americans, Hispanic Americans 1.5 times more likely, and that twenty percent of nonmilitary amputees report unmet rehabilitation needs because they cannot pay.⁷ Max Hurwitz, Daniel Norvell, and colleagues analyzed VA data and found that non-Hispanic Black veterans face increased prosthesis abandonment and worse mobility outcomes, with disparities most pronounced among rural Black veterans with major depressive disorder.⁸ Patients without specialist letters, paid time off, or private-pay prosthetists must still ask humans to help them write appeals, and those who cannot sustain the labor endure a sedentary life the coverage rule produced.

The campaign attacks a cost structure insurers built and then used to justify denying the device. Shaneis Kehoe and colleagues at the Medical Research Archives calculated that Colorado's, Connecticut's, and Illinois's bills would raise per-member monthly premiums by one cent to thirty-seven cents, under 0.04 percent of per capita US health spending.⁹ Maine's state actuarial review reached the same scale, projecting premium impact between zero and $0.12 per member per month.¹⁰ Insurers nonetheless class running blades and shower legs as lifestyle items, while a walking prosthesis covered under the same plan can cost $15,000 to $50,000 and a running blade roughly $13,000 to $20,000 at retail.¹¹¹² Marta Russell named the pattern in Beyond Ramps and in her money model of disablement, arguing that capital treats disabled bodies as a resource from which administrative, institutional, and device markets extract surplus while withholding the goods those markets were built around.¹³ SEBCM pushes state insurance law to break part of that extraction by forcing insurers to provision coverage for activity-specific devices inside the definition of covered care, which leaves the adaptation tax on the payer rather than on the disabled household running a GoFundMe.

Alison Kafer's work on the curative imaginary and on prosthetic embodiment clarifies what SEBCM does and does not change inside the limb-loss community. Kafer argues that utopian visions of technology erase disabled people by promising cure through devices, while the material reality of prosthetic use includes pain, residual-limb breakdown, and social stigma the curative narrative hides.¹⁴ SEBCM declines that frame. The campaign does not ask insurers to fix amputation through engineering. Amputees speak in their own testimony about running a 5K, taking their child into the pool, and returning to work on their feet, and they refuse the insurer's binary between basic mobility and luxury. The Amputee Coalition's organizing documents name the framing shift directly by treating movement as ordinary civic life and insurance denial as the barrier.¹⁵

Denial of activity-specific devices embeds as measurable cardiovascular and musculoskeletal harm. Amputees who cannot walk or run safely on their prescribed device develop residual-limb wounds, skin breakdown, and gait compensations that produce chronic back and contralateral-knee pain, while sustained inactivity elevates risk of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. A Korean cohort study of 22,950 amputees by Hea Lim Choi and colleagues found a significantly elevated incidence of myocardial infarction and stroke compared with matched controls.¹⁶ Sara Bouzas and colleagues' systematic review and meta-analysis showed that exercise improves physical fitness and functional capacity in adult lower-limb prosthesis users, which establishes the mechanism the denial blocks.¹⁷ The burden concentrates where Dewan documented already, on Black, Hispanic, rural, and low-income amputees, because abandonment of this population from prosthetic care compounds the vascular disease that led many of them to amputation in the first place.

SEBCM has restored activity-specific prosthetic coverage as a legal right in twelve states in four years and moved the campaign from a pediatric-only Maine bill to adult and orthotic coverage across most enacted laws. The frontier advances each time a governor signs, because the campaign forces insurers in that state to treat running, swimming, and showering as ordinary medical function rather than elective recreation. The limit remains structural. Federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act preemption keeps self-insured employer plans outside state insurance mandates, which covers most large private employers, and Colorado's HB23-1136 sat unimplemented into 2025 while state regulators waited for federal guidance on how the mandate intersects with Affordable Care Act essential health benefits.¹⁸ National coverage still waits on CMS to rewrite the K-level framework it authored, on Congress to close the ERISA gap, and on the next round of state wins the campaign's organizers keep building toward.

Real-world examples

In the news

Running on a Brick: The Harsh Reality of Amputees Seeking Proper Prosthetics (June 2024)
-- Fabienne Lang, Strava Stories

• Nicole Ver Kuilen and Kyle Stepp describe receiving running blades only through donations and sympathetic prosthetists after repeated insurance denials that classified the devices as not medically necessary. Their accounts document the human help and user workarounds that amputees use when insurers refuse activity coverage, and the pressure that produced the campaign's requirement-setting strategy.

In the news

Frustration mounts with delayed athletic prosthetic coverage law (February 2025)
-- Bente Birkeland, Colorado Public Radio

• Birkeland reports that Colorado's HB23-1136 missed its January 1, 2025 effective date because state regulators waited on federal guidance about ACA essential-health-benefit interaction. Former state representative David Ortiz told CPR families were still asserting rights and getting denied while the agencies delayed, which shows how abandonment at the federal level stalls state-level requirement-setting.

In the news

New Maryland law requires coverage for special prosthetics used for physical activities (January 2025)
-- Caroline Foreback, CBS News Baltimore

• Foreback profiles John-Edward Heath, a Marine veteran and Paralympian who lost his leg after a drunk driver struck him, and who championed Maryland's SEBCM bill after learning that other amputees did not have the VA access he had. The coverage documents how disabled veterans transfer their own builder-side care into civilian requirement-setting.

In the news

Press Conference - 10-20-2025 - Introducing the So Every Body Can Move Act (October 2025)
-- The Ohio Channel

• Ohio lawmakers and SEBCM advocates introduced HB 564 at the statehouse, noting that eleven states had already enacted the coverage requirement. The press conference documents the campaign's statehouse method and the continued protest work that disabled advocates perform to keep the bill visible.

In the news

DRM Testimony SB 406 So Every Body Can Move Act FA (February 2025)
-- MedChi, The Maryland State Medical Society

• MedChi's Finance Committee testimony tied orthoses coverage to reduced risk of hypertension, diabetes, and vascular disease. The letter shows how the campaign converts clinical language into state requirement-setting through medical-society endorsement.

• Kyle Stepp, diagnosed with osteosarcoma in 2008 and an above-knee amputee since 2020, lobbied the New Mexico legislature after a donated running blade and helped carry HB 131 to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham's signature on April 6, 2023.³
• New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed S-1439/A-3856 on July 8, 2025, with cumulative bipartisan votes of 115-0, and the law applies to policies issued or renewed on or after October 6, 2025.⁵
• Georgia's legislature expanded its 2025 SEBCM law in the 2026 session to add state workers' health plans to the coverage requirement, as state reporter coverage documented in April 2026.¹⁹

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the requirement-setting stage sounds like insurers, legislators, and employers treating activity-specific prosthetics as standard medical coverage:

• "Our plan covers activity-specific prosthetic devices prescribed by the treating physician at the same tier as other durable medical equipment."
• "We removed functional-level caps on device access because activity level is a treatment goal, not a coverage criterion."
• "The bill we are filing requires carriers to cover devices for physical activity as medically necessary, and it names running, swimming, and showering explicitly so reviewers cannot slice those out."
• "As the employer, we are selecting a plan that covers recreational prostheses because our employees with limb loss should be able to walk their children to school and go to the pool."
• "Medical necessity is determined by the treating physician, not by a claims reviewer reading the chart three states away."
• "We will pay for the device the prosthetist fits, because the prosthetist is the one who examined the residual limb."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect sounds like insurers classifying activity-specific devices as elective and writing denial letters in clinical-sounding language that masks the financial logic:

• "The member's functional assessment indicates a K-2 level. A running prosthesis is not medically necessary for the prescribed activity level."
• "Our plan covers one prosthesis per limb-loss event. Additional devices for recreational purposes fall outside covered benefits."
• "We cover medically necessary prosthetics. Exercise is a lifestyle choice."
• "The sports prosthesis is experimental for this functional category. We require additional peer-reviewed evidence before a coverage determination."
• "Our actuaries have not modeled activity prosthetics as a standard benefit. We will revisit in the next contract cycle."
• "You have appeal rights. Submit additional clinical documentation within sixty days."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor amputees take on when their insurer denies the devices their physicians prescribe:

• "I have been denied three times. Each appeal takes six months and requires letters from my surgeon, my prosthetist, and my physical therapist. I do not know if I have a fourth appeal in me."
• "My prosthetist donated a spare running blade. That is how I got mine. I should not have needed my prosthetist's charity."
• "I run on a walking leg because I cannot get the right device covered. My residual limb breaks down and I stop for weeks."
• "I organized a fundraiser to pay for the blade. Fourteen thousand dollars from my community, because my insurer called it a luxury."
• "I called my state representative after the second denial. That call is how I found SEBCM and started showing up at the statehouse."
• "I stopped trying to be active. Fighting the insurer costs me more than the sedentary life costs me. I know what that will do to my heart. I know it."

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All observations occur within the context of US state-regulated commercial health insurance coverage for prosthetic and orthotic devices, where twelve states have enacted SEBCM mandates as of April 2026 and ERISA-governed self-insured employer plans remain outside state law.

Footnotes

1. Amputee Coalition of America, "Lead Advocate Certification: Module 1." https://learning.amputee-coalition.org/products/lead-advocate-certification-module-1 ↩

2. So Every BODY Can Move, "Empower through Movement" one-pager, June 5, 2024. https://soeverybodycanmove.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/One-Pager_So-Every-BODY-Can-Move_UPDATED-6-5-2024.pdf ↩ ↩²

3. Fabienne Lang, "Running on a Brick: The Harsh Reality of Amputees Seeking Proper Prosthetics," Strava Stories, June 27, 2024. https://stories.strava.com/articles/running-on-a-brick-the-harsh-reality-of-amputees-seeking-proper-prosthetics ↩ ↩²

4. Tara McMeekin, "Let Kids (and Adults) Play: Policy Efforts to Expand Access to Recreational Prostheses Gain Momentum," The O&P EDGE, May 1, 2023. https://opedge.com/let-kids-and-adults-play-policy-efforts-to-expand-access-to-recreational-prostheses-gain-momentum/ ↩

5. Living with Amplitude, "Prosthetic Insurance Laws: So EveryBODY Can Move State Tracker." https://livingwithamplitude.com/prosthetic-cost-insurance-reform-for-amputees/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, "Lower Limb Prostheses" provider compliance tips. https://www.cms.gov/training-education/medicare-learning-networkr-mln/compliance/medicare-provider-compliance-tips/lower-limb-prostheses ↩

7. Mahfuz Mahin Dewan, "Disparities in Amputee Care," Representation in Rehab. https://www.representationinrehab.org/blog/disparities-in-amputee-care ↩

8. Max Hurwitz, Joseph Czerniecki, David Morgenroth, Aaron Turner, Alison W. Henderson, Beth Halsne, and Daniel Norvell, "Racial disparities in prosthesis abandonment and mobility outcomes after lower limb amputation from a dysvascular etiology in a veteran population," PM&R, 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11804270/ ↩

9. Shaneis Kehoe, Jeffrey Cain, Angela Montgomery, and Lindi Mitsou, "A Multi-State Analysis of the Fiscal and Social Impact of Commercial Insurance Coverage for Recreational Prostheses in the United States," Medical Research Archives, May 2023. https://esmed.org/MRA/mra/article/view/3809 ↩

10. Maine Bureau of Insurance, "Report to the Joint Standing Committee on Health Coverage, Insurance and Financial Services: LD 1003 Mandated Benefit Review." https://www.maine.gov/pfr/insurance/sites/maine.gov.pfr.insurance/files/inline-files/LD1003-Maine-Mandated-Benefit-Athletic-Prosthetic-Report.pdf ↩

11. Bente Birkeland, "Frustration mounts with delayed athletic prosthetic coverage law," Colorado Public Radio, February 11, 2025. https://www.cpr.org/2025/02/11/frustration-mounts-with-delayed-athletic-prosthetic-coverage-law/ ↩

12. So Every BODY Can Move, "Fact Sheet," February 2024. https://soeverybodycanmove.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Fact-Sheet.pdf ↩

13. Marta Russell, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (Common Courage Press, 1998); Marta Russell and Ravi Malhotra, "Capitalism and Disability," Socialist Register, 2002. https://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/download/5784/2680/7711 ↩

14. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013). https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gz79x ↩

15. Amputee Coalition, "Support for H.F. 3339 and S.F. 3351 Regarding Patient Access to Prosthetic and Custom Orthotic Care," November 17, 2023. https://www.amputee-coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Minnesota-HF-3339-SF-3351_SEBCM-Letter-of-Support_AOPA-NAAOP-AAOP-AC_Submitted-11-17-2023.pdf ↩

16. Hea Lim Choi, Jung Eun Yoo, Miso Kim, Bongsung Kim, Junhee Park, Won Hyuk Chang, Heesun Lee, Kyungdo Han, and Dong Wook Shin, "Risk of Heart Disease in Patients With Amputation: A Nationwide Cohort Study in South Korea," Journal of the American Heart Association, 2024. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/JAHA.123.033304 ↩

17. Sara Bouzas, Antonio J. Molina, Tania Fernández-Villa, Kyle Miller, Miguel A. Sanchez-Lastra, and Carlos Ayán, "Effects of exercise on the physical fitness and functionality of people with amputations: Systematic review and meta-analysis," Disability and Health Journal, 2021. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32819852/ ↩

18. Caroline Foreback, "New Maryland law requires coverage for special prosthetics used for physical activities," CBS News Baltimore, January 14, 2025. https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/maryland-prosthetics-law-john-edward-heath-move-act/ ↩

19. Georgia Recorder, "Lawmakers expand law requiring insurers to cover more prosthetics, this time adding state workers," April 14, 2026. https://georgiarecorder.com/2026/04/14/lawmakers-expand-law-requiring-insurers-to-cover-more-prosthetics-this-time-adding-state-workers/ ↩