To be terrified about PIP?

[BobbyBiscuits]

I've tried to blank all this out for ages, but today it hit me when the government basically are saying I'm going to (they want me to) have my PIP cut off?
My main illnesses are severe depressive disorder, general anxiety disorder and severe anorexia. I've severe PTSD symptoms and also think I may have ADHD but have not been able to get diagnosed due to phobia of MH services since I got sectioned.
I now have physical symptoms also and severe osteperosis which I put on my last forms. But had no assessment for several years.
I'm praying this is BS from the Tories and they can't do it anyway as they'll be kicked out.
Or could labour still continue this assault against disabled people?
It would halve my already tiny income, other half is from ESA, and they could kick me off that too even though I can't do anything!?

What do people think?

Because I didn’t make that assertion?

Absolutely spot on. Not only migrating to Dystopia, but happy to do it, if some of the opinions on here are anything to go by. The lack of critical thinking around this issue is astonishing.

The mental hospitals were hugely expensive to run so that was why care ended up in society. A few decades ago my son would probably have been put into an institution. Now they use parents and family to do the care but people begrudge the PIp expenditure. It’s tiny by comparison with the cost of institutional care.

This weekend when my son insisted on yet another hair cut ( he dislikes the hair on his head sensation ) I finally concluded that supported living is the only way to go. We predicate out entire weekends around him eg taking him for exercise, to drama - he has language impairment - to the hairdressers etc PIp is a tiny proportion of care costs - things like supported living and direct payments are huge expenses etc This is just the Government looking for easy votes. However it will end up in tears as people like me throw in the towel. I can’t stand it anymore - I really can’t.

Oh and burning food might be because the person has poor executive functioning - they can’t recall when to take it out. An issue with SEN is the need for constant prompting.

So on a typical day you will say get your shoes on several times or is your bag packed etc Prompt to put food in over and check the clock - prompt to remove food. Prompt to take meds, prompt to change clothes etc

im still trying to understand why my son at midnight decided to eat microwaved tuna and sweet corn. He had stew for dinner cooked by me. Another ASD trait is to have no internal clock ( they are on melatonin) and crazy ideas eg microwaved salad with tomato sauce or deciding to have another dinner at midnight. Overeating can also he an issue as they crave the chew sensation.

Well as explained on the other recent thread these costs are small in comparison to things like revenue lost through tax evasion.

So we could target the real thieves rather than the most vulnerable.

Novel idea I know.

This is one of the issues the assault on disability benefits is designed to detract from. “Look over here - scroungers gaming the system”. Stops you from looking “over there” at the much larger sums being lost via the tax system, and on crap projects and policy planned on the back of an envelope.

Can you provide a source to show those sums are larger and exactly where they come from?

You’ll never convince some of the posters here that these cuts are ideological rather than necessary. The mindset of rooting out the ‘scroungers’ is too deeply entrenched, despite all the evidence to the contrary and self evident very low levels of fraud in the disability benefits system.

I'm sure there are plenty of physically disabled people that require help wiping their arses, but I just don't accept that anybody is 'too depressed' to wipe their arse

That poster didn't even say depression stopped her wiping her arse though. She said her MH was fine until she had to explain the assesor her why she can't just jump in the shower on the days she can't wipe her own arse. I thought it was pretty obvious that she was talking about a fluctuating physical disability making her unable to clean her self after a shit some days, and then an ignorant assesor had asked why she can't just jump in the shower, if someone can't reach and wipe their arse, common sense would be that undressing and jumping in the shower to reach and clean the same the area also isn't possible.

Google is your friend.

Also, do you really think it's going to be easy to find true and accurate figures on the Internet without being a top notch forensic accountant?

There are people out there trying to share this information. They are often smeared and shut down by doing so.

However, off the top of my head - how much money was shuffled around during Covid between the government and large corporations invested in disaster capitalism?

The industrial military complex - that's a doozy. Black Rock, and Vanguard are names to check out on that one.

Big Pharma. Nuff said.

Happy hunting old bean.

Google it - all the information is there. Can you provide a reliable source that the government is being truthful about the amount of fraud and ‘gaming’ in the system. There are so many errors in what Sunak and his ministers have said about various benefits, I don’t know where to start with it all. And they’re deliberately giving the impression that PIP is an out of work benefit when it’s nothing of the sort. Why do you think that is ?

We are losing about £1.5 billion a year due to tax avoidance and fraud.

PIP (and that’s just PIP - not benefits in general, and nowhere near public services in general) costs £22 billion.

Even if we recouped the money from evasion and fraud it would go nowhere near making a dent in our deficit or the sums needed to transform our public services in the way everyone demands on here.

No doubt this comment will be ignored.

Can you provide a reliable source that the government is being truthful about the amount of fraud and ‘gaming’ in the system

’Can you provide a reliable source to show the first reliable source is lying?’

I accompanied a claimant on a PIP assessment. She was a double amputee - above knee both sides. The assessor actually asked her why she needed help in and out of the shower when she could sit on the floor. Beggars belief doesn’t it ?

We could focus energies on training and recruiting staff into the health and social care sectors to prop up the care bill.

Or throw everyone into facilities as you seem to want.

So you’re happy to admit tax evasion and fraud is an issue but not one that would solve any of our problems if actually ended?

Two entirely separate issues. Solving one will put money back into the pot to help the other though.

Directly above posters were saying tax evasion and fraud is a much bigger problem than the welfare bill.

Well yes tax evasion is a criminal offence so it is a bigger problem than disabled people living their lives

Don’t be facetious. We need to confront the fact that we have to address spending on welfare rather than just holding up tax evasion and ‘Tory cronies’ as a false bogeyman. Yes they’re an issue and should be addressed but the biggest issue is our unemployment rate - nothing is going to plug the holes in the way getting even 20% of the unemployed back to work will.

One way to get many back to work, and no longer qualifying for PIP:

Just on a small local scale - I'm close to the top of the list for an urgent heart operation to keep me working. (my PIP will of course stop while I'm in hospital - though my disability costs don't.)
The operation should happen in four months if I have managed not to have a stroke or heart attack before that date, having survived waiting for 8months with a few IHA's causing more issues, and expensive hospital stays. (but society saved a small amount of PIP while spending a large amount of NHS money instead)

I joined the urgent list autumn last year, because of the number of times my heart literally stops each day, and meet with 19 others on that list, at a specific cardiac monitoring clinic for echocardiograms. (There are multiple different clinics full of folks waiting for operations)

All but one of us at mine work, I'm S/E, 2 are on light duties, but the majority 16 are currently on long term sickness benefit and having to claim PIP to survive their conditions financially while they wait for an operation to re-enable them to not need benefits.
Our cardiologist fumes about having declared each of us urgent, then having to make us wait in pain and fear and repeatedly pulling us into hospital trying to keep us going and mend incurred damage, so we can eventually have our 'urgent' relatively easy operations.

This is just 16 people who are costing huge amounts of misspent money to be kept from working, and another 4 who together will cost everyone so much more if we deteriorate waiting for 'urgent ' treatment. Our treatment waiting, also costs a fortune.

If you multiply all the people all over the UK this is being done to, and fix it, not only will a fortune be saved, and many PIP claims reduced, and people back to work, but you'll benefit society as a whole, make loads of people very happy and face very little opposition. It's a win win for all.

TBF, post op I will still be PIP reliant to work, but most of the rest are only disabled by the fixable heart condition.

It seems too much like hard work and easier to leave it as a shit show and blame whoever is least likely to attract sympathy, though.

Don't tell me how I should or should not respond to an internet post.

Don’t tell me how I should not tell somebody to reply to an Internet post..

Good little Tory bot.

Have a biscuit and keep banging your drum. It's an amusing diversion in its way.

Look at what government ministers have been saying since Sunak’s speech a couple of weeks ago. Look at what Sunak himself said. They continually mix up disability and sickness benefits and don’t appear to know what they are actually paid for. There are constant references to getting people off PIP and back into work. PIP isn’t an out of work benefit. Sunak didn’t appear to know that GP led treatment for anxiety and depression doesn’t qualify for PIP, because he continually referred to ‘labelling everyday anxieties as health conditions’ when talking about that specific benefit. If they can’t grasp what the actual benefits are paid in respect of, how are we supposed to trust that they can reform them fairly ? And I wouldn’t trust anyone who labels treatment of mental health conditions as ‘medicating everyday worries’.

When you look at the history of PIP it’s evident what’s happening here, and it’s not down to fraud or ‘gaming the system’. The tories introduced PIP to replace DLA on the assumption that it was too easy to claim and therefore over subscribed by people who weren’t really disabled. PIP was a much harsher assessment but didn’t achieve the expected savings because the assumption that previous DLA claimants weren’t genuine proved to be wrong when claimants were migrated from one benefit to the other. And the cost of the benefit ballooned because the assessment is badly designed and screens out high levels of disability so many claimants have been forced to go to tribunal to get a fair decision. Now add in the fact that the Tory government who introduced PIP opened it up to mental health conditions - with the same flawed thinking that if you narrow the eligibility conditions not many people will qualify - and you begin to see the real problem.

The fact is that if the government wanted to save money but genuinely wanted to support disabled people, there are plenty of places they could have looked for savings before they launched an all out assault on the most vulnerable in the country. The sick and disabled have been in the firing line for every round of cuts, with the same old ableist trope trotted out every time to hoodwink the public into thinking they’re all a bunch of scroungers, sponging off tax payers money.

I’m not even a Tory voter. You’re just attacking the person now as you can’t respond.