Well, you do, but if you’re living independently, it’s likely to be a future in which penury features prominently.
This is from an article in the Guardian online and, if you rely on DLA, it should scare the hell out of you:-
Elderly people could be compelled to pay up to £20,000 to insure themselves against the cost of being cared for at the end of their lives. The proposals are designed to replace a system that the government describes as unjust with one that is “fair, simple and affordable for everyone”.
The health secretary, Andy Burnham, said there was an urgent need to reform the structure of funding that forces some people to pay up to £200,000 for care, while others receive it free. At the moment, 50% of people pay more than £25,000 for their end-of-life care, while 20% pay more than £50,000.
What planet, I’m forced to wonder, is Andy Burnham on? Just where are people supposed to get £20,000? It most certainly is NOT affordable for everyone.
I’m not elderly, but it comes to us all in time, but how does someone in my position come up with twenty grand? I haven’t been able to work since January 1985 – and my position is by no means unique – I’ve been living on disability benefits since 1986. My bank account stands, right now, at £211 overdrawn, and by the end of the month that will double (it’ll come down again, too, but my default state is overdrawn), and the chances of coming up with such an amount is somewhere between none and, er, none.
It is absolutely insane to say that this is “affordable for everyone” – it’s bloody not. And consider this gem, also from the Guardian:-
The government is not proposing to make new public funding available, but has proposed to end the disability living allowance for elderly people – which is not a means-tested benefit – to free up about £6.1bn that would then be returned to the budget for means-tested social care. (my emphasis)
There is absolutely no logic, and no justice, in elderly disabled people being penalised to pay for care that they may not need.
Not all elderly people require care – more and more people, even disabled people, are staying active and living independent lives into their eighties and nineties, as, indeed I might if I survive this bloody flu (which is looking increasingly unlikely). But apart from me, there are, and will continue to be, thousands of people on DLA who get old without needing care – what happens to them? As disabled people get old, they get less mobile, and DLA becomes, probably, more important, not less.
Many people, too, put their DLA into the household budget, and would not survive without it. Take my case – my rent alone exceeds my Incapacity Benefit. OK, I get Housing Benefit, but my point is that DLA is an essential resource for many people (a great deal of mine goes on taxi fares, for example – just because I might be seventy one day doesn’t mean I may not want to go out then; I probably will, but I won’t be able to without DLA.
What happens now, though no-one is mentioning it, is that if I were to go into care, for example, my benefits would be forfeit, to pay for my care! So there is no need to stop paying DLA for everyone to fund care. The idea that it’s actyally necessary is a lie, and being used simply as an excuse to pander to Daily Mail reading pricks who hate the idea of DLA and see it as money for nothing.
But it’s not. In my case, as I’ve said before, my DLA, and my IB, are for being unable to work – for being in severe, intransigent pain 24/7/365 since 1983, when I was struck by lightning; for suffering the horrors of ME/CFS in the face of almost universal disbelief; for having no immune system to speak of; for being unable to breath properly due to severe COPD (I’ve never smoked, I suffered from the precursors to my COPD all my life); it’s for life in a wheelchair, and for a great deal more.
This is not free money – I pay for it every moment of my life.
So, before we’re all reduced to penury in our old age, does anyone have the slightest idea what can be done here? Is any organisation representing old people willing to launch a judicial challenge on our behalf? Because if this goes through, we’re all screwed – big-time. Twice, too – we’re expected to stump up twenty grand, and we lose our bloody DLA. WTF is going on?
And we are screwed! Age Concern and Help the Aged have welcomed this exercise in mendacity as an attempt to fix the “broken care system”. Yes, it is broken, but buggering up the lives of those who don’t need care is not the answer, you goddamn retards!
And Michelle Mitchell, director of Help the Aged, says “All political parties and the public must now look beyond the short-term squeeze on our national finances to agree a fairer way to pay for care.”
So, fine, a long-term squeeze – unless we have the decency to die early – on the elderly disabled is perfectly acceptable to Ms Mitchell. In which case, Ms. Mitchell, I do hope, for your sake, you lead a long and healthy life – whatever you do, try not to need DLA.
