Can there be any more ringing denunciation of the system for assessing DLA than Sue Marsh’s blog post yesterday?
I have severe crohn’s disease. Probably one of the most severe cases in the country.
I have had 7 major life saving operations to remove over 30 obstructions (blockages) from my bowel.
I take chemo-shots every two weeks that suppress my immune system, ensuring that I regularly have to fight infections. Exhaustion, pain and nausea plague every single day of my life.
I have osteoprosis and malnutrition.
I have had major seizures and a stroke.
Nonetheless, I have just heard from my own Disability Living Allowance application, that it has been rejected. Completely. I will receive no support at all from DLA. Despite claiming successfully in the past, despite only getting weaker and more frail and less able to live independently, my reconsideration was rejected.
Unbelievable. Reading through her list of illnesses and disabilities, my first reaction was, how the HELL can she have been turned down? Even she doesn’t seem to know.
The reasons they gave for the original rejection were nonsensical and didn’t relate to he information I had given on my form. Today, the letter refusing my reconsideration had no details at all.
And remember, this is before the welfare reform bill comes in. That’s the reforms that are already causing disabled people to become suicidal and will condemn cancer patients to poverty for being feckless enough not to get better within a year.
Marsh’s blog post is spreading like wildfire on Twitter and in the Blogosphere. I wonder what the reaction will be from the mainstream media?
My guess is that there’ll be a chin-stroking news report from the Guardian, and a deafening silence from the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Times, the Telegraph…Sorry, but to a wide section of the media and the general public, this isn’t the benefits story to get outraged about. The real injustice (apparently) is when somebody manages to scrounge a few quid they’re not entitled to.
I’ve noticed this with various friends when talking about stories similar to Sue Marsh’s – desperately ill and disabled people turned down for DLA on the most spurious of reasons. They’ll listen as briefly as they can to be polite, and then the cognitive dissonance kicks in, and they start changing the subject to talking about “benefit scroungers” who unjustly claim DLA. Because that’s far more worrying than some genuinely disabled person who’s had the ladder kicked from under them.
Maybe these are the Christian values and morals that Mr Cameron seems so keen on recently. Castigate and punish the poor, the weak and the vulnerable. Leave them unable to cope on a bureaucrat’s whim. Who cares, so long as none of the underclass get a penny more than they’re supposed to?
And what does that say about us as a society?
warriet
December 18, 2011
its says that society sucks and that the self-interest and greed have become the behavioural norm
Clarissa
December 18, 2011
My advice would be, appeal, get a free lawyer (they do exist) and really go public, if one can bear it. If it wasn’t that publicity would cause me career suicide, i’d have done it myself ages ago.
As for the comments about Cameranian Christianity… What an insult to Christianity – which whatever you believe in, actually does have strong humane and rational values at its heart. Millions of people of faith rely on one religion or another just to give them the strength to get from one end of the day to the other. While i accept that the Cameron’s have known tragedy, and will likely feel the death of their son for the rest of their lives (not wished on my worst enemy), what do they really understand about the struggle to survive physical and mental illness that utterly ruins quality of life, and when survival really does equate to an extra few pounds each month?
The policies this government are employing are sightlessly ruining lives and hurting those they pledged to protect. And they wonder why people protest and riot?
Socrates
December 18, 2011
How many people are just giving up the fight? How many of the Street Crazies you pass on the way to work are entitled to proper community care, sickness benefits and DLA? Quite a lot of them I would imagine…
And harking back to a previous post here, How many suicides are being recorded as something else, on account of the deceased’s purported unbalanced mind? In Cambridgeshire, it seems crazies killing themselves aren’t actually considered suicide
ermintrude2
December 18, 2011
It makes me so sad and so angry.