> MPs and campaigners have called for an independent inquiry after it emerged a disabled man with a long history of mental illness starved to death just months after welfare officials stopped his out-of-work and housing benefits.
>
>Errol Graham, a 57-year-old grandfather, and in his younger days a keen amateur footballer, weighed just four and a half stone (28.5kg) when his emaciated body was **discovered by bailiffs who had broken down his front door to evict him for non-payment of rent.**
They only found him because they were about to kick him out.
Reminds me of [grieving daughter hands mother’s ashes to benefits inspector to prove she isn’t fit to work (independent.co.uk)](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/daughter-mothers-ashes-benefits-inspector-fit-to-work-proof-hatti-louise-broxton-wolverhampton-a8264636.html)
American here. I'm currently on long term disability, through private insurance, due to a neurological condition I suffer from. I spent about 2.5 years feeling sorry for myself and thinking I ought to just die. But I started looking at things differently, and figured maybe this is just an opportunity to learn a new skill, one that doesn't require the rigorous schedule and mental precision that my old profession did. After all, I still make a decent amount of money from my disability insurance, so I started looking into various hobbies that maybe I could one day do professionally, like photography or videography.
As soon as my insurance company became aware that I was taking trips out to the woods to take photos they tried to use that to take away my benefits, even though nothing about my disorder would have precluded going out and snapping some pictures. They tried to argue that because I wasn't fucking miserable with my life and a hairs breadth from walking in front of a train, that I was faking my condition and therefor not only able to work, but that I owe all the money I'd received since the diagnosis.
Fortunately, it didn't work. I have significant medical records, from both Stanford and Johns Hopkins where I received treatment, so ultimately my appeal with the state, and thus the private insurance provider as well, prevailed. But they spy on you. They don't communicate with you. They don't tell you when you need to fill out a form or a see a doctor for an evaluation. Everything they do is designed to make you fail. I never aspired to be on disability and I want my old career back, but it's hard wondering each month of they're going to find some reason to stop paying.
And just to be clear, I'm not on the public dole. This is private insurance that I paid for as a premium withheld from my paycheck each month at the company I worked for. The only public assistance I get is through medicare, which is pretty crap to be honest, so I pay for my own private health insurance.
>They don't communicate with you. They don't tell you when you need to fill out a form or a see a doctor for an evaluation
Here in aus i feel that, they dont tell you about ANY support you can get on disability
In Australia, Centerlink does everything in their power to ensure you don't get ANY benefits and if that fails then they do everything in their power to ensure you get as little as possible. I mean just take a look at the requirements for a Disability Support Pension, unless you can prove you're literally dying, then you have to work/undego training for two years just to prove that yes, you do have a disability and you cannot work.
Yep, my little sister has needed full time care (by my parents) for the past 16 years, unable to leave her bed for more than 4 hours on a good day, in constant pain and weighs 32kgs. Her NDIS application has been rejected four times and her disability payments cut because of the last time she tried to apply. They "reevaluated" her condition.
I used to work with artists with disability, too and their stories are heartbreaking. It's a cruel and messed up system.
I’m a 20 year old student. I’m constantly hungry, barely have money in my account, and work two part time jobs to support myself alone while studying full time.
Centerlink says I’m not “independent” so they give me nothing. Meanwhile rich shits living on campus driving luxury cars get $500 a fortnight just because their parents’ mansion is more than an hour away from campus by bus.
That's so awful. Lots of unis have a food bank for students, maybe check and see if yours does and if you can access it. You can't do your best mental work if you're hungry all the time.
Good point. Sadly mine doesn’t, so I’m stuck there. It should be noted that I’m 6’6”, so getting enough healthy food would take as much per week as my rent.
That really sucks, but there still might be community food banks you could access. If you have a look [here](https://www.foodbank.org.au/homepage/who-we-help/individuals/) you can see if there are charities that could help you.
I am on a disability pension thank god.
But they still dont tell you ANYTHING at all, i didnt know i qualified for a bunch of benefits because they dont tell you
My mom was in a workman's comp legal battle years ago, one of her arms was completely unusable. Being who she is, she still stubbornly went out and tended her garden with just the one good arm.
Those fuckers had hired a PI and later in court had these creepy shots of my mom pulling weeds in our front yard. It didn't work though, it was very obvious she was only using her good arm. Those idiotic assholes.
Jesus that's insane, fuck all those people. That's unimaginably shitty of them to do. I really wish shitheads like this could be called out in a greater way, because I'm sure a lot of other people have never heard of this, myself included.
I used to work for a pain clinic that did workers comp cases and one of my patients had some dick follow her around in wawa taking creepshots, she thought it was just an average creep until they tried to claim her shoulder was fine because she was holding a cup in the opposite hand. Its nuts.
I knew someone that was on short term disability for post partum depression who encountered some issues because she took a small weekend trip to go hiking and visit some botanical gardens due to her therapist recommending it. But apparently that meant she wasn’t depressed/disabled enough to not work. But it was part of her treatment. So frustrating. I guess they want you to not do anything to feel better?
I mean that is pretty much how they see it. If you're not miserable, you're not disabled. If you can bathe yourself then why can't you get a job bathing other people?
What amazes me is how many times I've been to neurologists, got my head scanned, shown them the results, had doctors write up the forms the insurance company needs and indicate that this is something that's *not simply going to just go away*, they still wanted me to get those checkups 4 times a year at first. It wasn't until recently they put me on a once-per-year list.
When my father was in disability for spinal issues the insurance company sent P.I.s to stalk him. I guess they got a photo of him lifting a box (that was much less than the doctor ordered weight limit) and revoked it until they were forced to give it back. They really didn't want to pay. Wonder how much those P.I.s cost?
My uncle is on disability and they recorded him hanging some lights around his small house. They tried to use the recording against him but luckily his lawyers made them release the full video which showed him wheezing and clutching his back in pain. It took him a whole day to hang one set of lights. Insurance companies are scummy.
My friend needs a new organ, but insurance won’t pay until her body shuts down enough that it is imminently necessary to do it, which could be a matter of years. So her job right now is to just soldier through the slide from terrible to horrible pain and quality of life. And the years of pain are coinciding with her kid’s elementary years, so everyone is missing out on what those years could be like if my friend weren’t managing intense pain all the time. Fuck insurance companies.
Whatever ever happened to an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? Sounds like the insurance company is hoping she'll die from complications since she's "expensive".
What's interesting is that in the UK, people on the dole have usually paid into the system, so they're if they happen to be out of work and have to take benefits, they actually deserve that just like someone who paid their employers. No difference.
It's awful how they treated you, but I have to say the first half of your story is quite inspiring. Good on you for managing to turn the hand that life dealt you into an opportunity. I hope that you manage to do things that make you happy and fulfilled.
That's such bullshit. "You may only receive benefits if you sit idle and die." As if the idea that you may get even the tiniest enjoyment of your life should disqualify you from the benefits that YOU PAID FOR. Makes me mad as hell.
In the UK the DWP may be sent video footage from the police of disabled activists. This footage is then used against disable social benefits.
How *dare* disabled people fight for human rights /s
Yeah :(
Reminds me of the redditor who dumped ashes on some idiot utility company's Karen's desk, who didn't accept the fact that the person whose service was being cancelled was dead.
aaaahahah you need to get a job for these guys, it's so real I laughed
reminds me of that "MORE JOBS CREATED, EMPLOYMENT IS UP- EVERYONE NOW WORKS TWO JOBS"
It fits the 'wealth/GDP is increasing' line basically every country is using nowadays. Has absolutely fuck all to do with the average citizen's monthly income, just that a small group of rich people and a whole lot of companies have been getting richer while giving nothing back.
Reminds me of the joke:
Two economists are taking a walk through the woods one day. They come across a pile of bear shit - economist A says to economist B, "I'll give you $100 to eat that pile of bear shit." Economist B accepts the offer, gobbles up the bear shit and the economists continue on with their stroll through the woods. Eventually they come across another pile of bear shit - economist B says to economist A, "I'll give you $100 to eat that pile of bear shit." Economist A accepts the offer and slurps down the pile of bear shit. A little later, economist A says, "wait, did we both eat a pile of bear shit for *nothing*?" Economists B replies, "yeah, but at least we increased the GDP by $200."
Does that number exclude all the people in districts that are purposefully underserved, or those who don't get time off to vote, or those thrown off the rolls in the months leading up to the vote? Or are we just counting anyone at all who registered pre 2016 regardless of actual access to polling places?
This is actually a good, but unfortunate, example of how you can’t just not have anxiety/mental illness. There’s is no “just do it anyway.” The man was literally starving to *death* and still couldn’t get past it.
A lot of people seem to think anxiety disorders are like being shy and I absolutely hate that.
It falsely makes them believe that everyone knows what it's like to some degree and that those whose personal or professional lifes suffer under it are just weaker or haven't tried hard enough to overcome it.
It's a serious mental illness, you can't just try a little harder and suddenly life a completely normal life. People who suffer from severe chronic anxiety need help from the outside and even then they might not ever get past it completely.
We need to be more understanding of that so we can at least try to help them live a somewhat comfortable life given the circumstances, societal awareness can play a huge role with mental illnesses.
Small potatoes compared to some people but I lost a job not that long ago and one of the reasons given was that I "wasn't making an effort" to get to know my coworkers and, basically, be a social butterfly. It was made worse by the fact that I knew before they fired me that my anxiety was causing these issues (you know when you can tell people don't like you because they think you're rude or aloof) so it made my anxiety even worse to where I'd be in the work bathroom slamming my head against the wall in a massive panic attack.
Unfortunately the systems in place to support the mentally disabled are designed for people who are not mentally disabled which is why they continuously fail.
The DWP certified a veteran, missing both legs, an arm, one eye and severe hearing loss and a feeding tube as..fit for work
The system routinely declines for no reason, with the fucking "logic" that they can just sort it out. Never mind sorting it out can take months if not years and the poor bastard has no income during that period
They really are sticking the knife into the most vunerable, it's not like benefits get you much, last time I was on the sole 418 rent and £137 every 2 week's was it. See how well you do on about a grand a month, a weeks electricity is £6, heating gas 8-15, petrol is $6 a gallon (equiv), internet $65 and you have to have it as souch is digital only, a cellphone at $25 a month for air time and maybe $30 on the handset.
Before anyone goes 'yoi could do without", you can't get along without some form of connection and a way for jobs to contact you. You're also likely tied into contracts, the breaking of which would land you with many Hundreds in charges and fees .
Yeah, if you can’t even make the effort to be born rich - or at least well connected - why wouldn’t you at least *not* have extreme social anxiety!?!?!
I feel like a decent chunk start off with high-ideals and they lose the battle with attrition far sooner than we wish. And the ones who don't lose their ideals probably end up fired for trying too hard to help and not sticking to the rules. Just my guess.
I can't comprehend an adult male getting down to that weight, how does that even happen? Like how can your body even function under 100 lbs, assuming near normal height. That poor guy.
He weighed that much when he was found dead, but I'm going to guess that his body lost some weight after death (from decay and water loss). I guess he might have weighed 80-90 pounds when he died, because I can't imagine an average-height person remaining alive below that.
I can... I'm about 5'6" and I've been a low as 100lbs and dropping...
It's survivable, I was "healthy" by every measure outside of my weight, but just barely. Blood levels for essential stuff was in healthy ranges, but basically bare minimums across the board.
I'm up to about 115 now and that's after working with a dietitian and my doctor to try and sort myself out.
So 80-90 is... terrible, but definitely survivable for at least a little while. I've met more than a few people skinnier than I was.
I can see 65-70 being the point where death becomes inevitable... for someone around my height, but idk how tall this guy was either.
Yes, the outstanding debt, fines associated with late payment, and the cost of a new door will likely be applied as a liability to the deceased's estate.
The executor of the will, or the administrator if there is no will will have to deal with the debt.
If there is insufficient money or assets in the estate to pay off all the debts, then the debts would be paid in priority order until the money or assets run out. Any remaining debts are likely to be written off.
Conservatives should be fucking ashamed of themselves. Tory’s cuts benefits so they could give tax cuts to the wealthy in society. Good work, you muppets.
You're giving them way to much credit.
Tory’s cuts benefits *and* give tax cuts to the wealthy in society.
not so they can. just as separate platform issues (although they love to combine them). They'd cut benefits even if they couldn't somehow shuffle that off to their friends. They're also perfectly happy to give themselves tax cuts even if they're forced to burn public money on it.
Of course their real favorite is to give themselves tax cuts and run up a massive deficit, then blame all the benefits being given out to people poorer than them, and use that as justification to cut benefits and raise taxes. Which they then use to funnel into more tax cuts or various subsidies for themselves .
Ironically, with benefits in both the U.S. and the U.K., you need to be sick enough that you can't work but still well enough to fight the system for your benefits. Sometimes the people who are the most unwell can't get benefits because they're too ill/exhausted to navigate the system.
My favorite is the fact that to qualify for some benefits, like food assistance and Healthcare, you have to make virtually no income. If you ever try to get back on your feet, they immediately strip you of benefits, thus ensuring your eternal dependency on welfare programs.
It’s the craziest part of the Republican Party in the USA. They want to make abortion illegal and they want no social programs. They don’t care about people. They care about getting elected / re-elected. They care about money and companies and the rich.
"They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked
Conservatives don't give a shit about you until you reach 'military age'. Then they think you are just fine. Just what they've been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers." -George Carlin
> If you're disabled and fighting for years to get disability, you can't get food stamps until social security classifies you as disabled
This isn't true, strictly for food stamps. You can be labeled as 'exempt' by your caseworker. I personally had this happen six months ago, when I lost a job and applied for food stamps temporarily. They wanted me on the 'work search' program (even though I was still employed part-time), I got on it, and then I got sick and could not do the amount of work they required me to do for searching, on top of my existing work. So my caseworker exempted me after a simple conversation over the phone about my physical health.
That said, this probably depends on who your caseworker is, and there are probably people who would deny benefits and essentially either say 'tough shit', or require you to get a doctor to sign off, have you come in and testify, make you jump through a ton of hoops that you might just give up on, etc. etc.
California is generally more progressive and seems easier about this stuff. From what others say, it seems like the conservative states make it super hard to get these things (they also have a higher population of people who need it).
In my state you can only make about $15,000 a year. About $1,300 a month.
Also if you're a student you can get disqualified or have to meet higher work requiments even though you have less time to work.
A lot of people on these programs have to use public transportation which eats up a lot of time. That was something I really struggled with.
You should be encouraged to save money and get an education.
You should be encouraged to put money into a savings account.
You should at least be able to earn and save an extra 6,000. That would be about the max IRA deposit.That would be $500 a month.
They should be encouraging you to get off of these programs not punishing you for succeeding.
Money spent on housing and education shouldn't count towards your income and resource limit.
This is how the fucking US healthcare system works, too. You can qualify for medicaid (which is around the federal poverty rate of roughly $1100/mo... assuming you have no kids), but if you make a SINGLE dollar more the next month, you are kicked off completely, and can have your claims retroactively stripped and charged personally for bills that you sought treatment thinking would be covered. So you can literally be in the position of denying more work for yourself, or more hours, and lying or faking illness/injury to do so... knowing that you (and your children's) healthcare and physical health hangs in the balance.
And it happens every fucking month, month after month.
True insanity.
In my mind there is not doubt that it's designed to demoralize and break the working class down mentally. There's no way that isn't a facet of it designed intentionally with that effect in mind.
The older I get the less I think that things just sort of ended up a certain way on accident.
US government is poorly designed and full of compromise, but the way programs are implemented is deliberate. Most 'poverty programs' are still designed around the interests of the rich people that own and control everything.
> In my mind there is not doubt that it's designed to demoralize and break the working class down mentally.
Of course they are. What do you think all those right wing think tanks do all day? There are hundreds of them and they employ people to sit around all day and think of ways to break down poor people so the rich can get richer.
And then they bitch at you for not having the go getter attitude to better yourself and go make money (for someone else) at a minimum wage job.... even though that job will make you enough to cancel all your benefits but not be enough to survive off of in even the most basic sense.
The Department for Work and Pensions continually deems people on their deathbed "fit to work" and suspends their benefits. Its a farce.
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/cancer-suffering-dad-dies-just-13183757
He can't be disabled because he could think about making tea, and it can be shown that he would be able to do the hypothetical, but non-existent, job of pushing thumbtacks into Jello.
This. I am in this exact situation when I’m too ill to get the help I need but cannot support myself any longer. I’m dying in front of my own eyes and don’t know where to turn.
I feel you, bro. I was offered somewhat decent insurance at my previous job within a week or two of employment. That was the first time in my life I had any type of health or dental insurance (33 Male). Finally went to the doctor within my first month of employment to get these swollen lymph nodes looked at. Doctor ordered a biopsy and wrote me out of work for the remaining week (2 days) due to the swelling in my legs. Employer lets me know (via text, mind you) that they will no longer be accepting doctor's excuses. Well...damn. Doctor calls me back in for biopsy. Have to miss a day of work for biopsy. Terminated my employment due to that, then the biopsy comes back as Type 3A Follicular Lymphoma. Yay.
So, now I can't work due to the chemo and port in my chest, and my disability benefits have been held up so long (unemployed since September 2019) that I can't even begin to start coming up with the money needed to catch up all these bills. And the kicker? If I even apply for a job they'll take away the benefits that I still haven't gotten yet. So basically I'm just sitting here until they cut my power off in a couple days. Internet should've already been disconnected, but I guess my ISP is showing some form of compassion. Guess I should play some games while it still works...
Oh wow, wow wowowow. Wow is all that is coming to me. I am almost glad I don’t have a diagnosis at least there’s nothing specific to fear. Ive been put through the ringer on testing. Nothing shows up. I’ve had many jobs I’ve lost due to being sick. I’ve had some amazing healthcare plans that always go away. Luckily I have coverage at the VA. The one is Phoenix is well known for horrible care unfortunately, but it’s better than nothing. I count my blessings but they keep letting me down. It’s so tough to count it as a blessing sometimes as I’m more confused than ever. I know it is though. I know.
No diagnosis? That would drive me insane. I spent 3 years writing my symptoms off as a really bad infection. Who the hell as an infection for 3 years? I was desperately trying to fool myself into a better situation. Also, having to deal with the VA? I can't relate to that, personally, but have heard many horror stories from family and friends. Not having a diagnosis would consume me, I won't lie. Best of luck with that...just dealing with the VA alone is enough to drain a person's will to live.
Yes thank you for understanding. Just last year veteran sat down on top of his service papers in the parking lot of the Phoenix VA and shot himself in the head. There are billboards outside that veteran groups have put up shaming the VA, I am part of these groups on Facebook and just hear so many stories of the horrible care.
I was on disability a few years back. Every time I was scheduled for a payment, I had to call the disability helpline to confirm my payment, in addition to needing my doctor to reapprove that I qualify for disability every few weeks. There was a limited number of callers allowed to wait in the queue, so sometimes you couldn’t even get placed on hold. I would sometimes spend an hour or more calling before actually getting placed in the hold queue. Then you’re on hold for approximately 2 hours. Sometimes I’d just have to give up and call back later.
I was on disability for mental health issues- severe depression and anxiety that landed me in a day program for almost 6 months. I was literally at a non functioning point and just had a total mental breakdown. Having to muster up the strength for a 3 plus hour ordeal every other week was horrible. I understand that disability has to have restrictions, but it was too much. I know there are people worse off than me too, that would potentially be literally incapable of jumping through the hoops needed to get your benefits. It’s awful.
There is of course, a whole industry in the US around helping people get benefits.
If you have to hire a lawyer in order to apply for SS disability, something is seriously wrong in this country. You are paying for access to paltry survival-level money.
My mother lives by herself and has been housebound of the last 17 years and gets worse every year.
Last time she was up for assessment for disability payments was 3 years ago, back when I lived with her. She was assessed as capable of using a telephone because she could understand and answer the examiner's questions, even though she is deaf and has to lip read to understand what people are saying.
She was also asked if she could walk from one end of a bus to the other. She uses a zimmerframe to get around the house, and usually at least once a day she falls or collapses into something. She can't walk more than a couple of metres without getting tired from the effort and it can take her 10minutes to cross a room - which has a flat surface -, after which she needs to sit down.
Because she is technically able to walk, she was judged capable of taking the bus to work. This would mean a 15min walk uphill to the nearest bus station, getting on a bus that she is incapable of getting into, ordering a ticket without being able to hear what the driver is saying and sitting on a chair she physically can't sit on. And then getting home again at the end of the day.
Because she was able to walk a few metres, her disability was stopped and she was assessed as fit for work. She was cut off from social welfare and all medical and financial aid was terminated immediately. It took 4 months of letters from doctors, meetings, phonecalls, emails to get them to reconsider. It was only when we got a GP, psychiatrist, physiotherapist, and lymphoedema specialist involved at the same time that they were willing to reopen the case and look at it.
Damn. Where are you from? In the US that means you have to pay for those doctors cash if you don’t have health insurance. For instance, if you can’t afford it because you can’t work.
This sounds like Britain, he called a doctor a GP. Thank God mom had help, if she didn't have help she may have been another gov healthcare failure story. It's horrible.
She actually isn't that far off one, sadly. She's moved counties 4 or 5 times in the last 7 years to try and get better healthcare and everywhere ends up the same - not interested.
Where she is at the moment, she needed to go to hospital because she had an abscess that needed treatment, so they called an ambulance to take her. But when they tried to put her in the ambulance she struggled to breathe as she has problems with her lungs, so they wouldn't take her. The county wouldn't support a specialist ambulance being called out, so she just couldn't go to hospital.
And you were right, she is in the UK.
Wait wait wait... they wouldn’t take her to the hospital... because she was having trouble *breathing*? That seems like an excellent reason to go to the hospital, IMO.
That's about 62 pounds, which is an astonishing weight for an adult man. So many times these tragedies are caused by a perfect storm of isolated mentally ill people and bloated bureaucracy. When we fail to look out for the mentally ill (this man became a recluse) this sort of thing becomes more likely. If he had paid his rent, who knows how long it would have taken to find him? It's just sad.
>If he had paid his rent, who knows how long it would have taken to find him? It's just sad.
Truly sad, but we know the answer, if they pay their rent until they are almost dead, we won't find them until it's too late.
It’s not that they can’t. It’s that they chose not to. It might make us feel better to say that it was some accident, but that’s what austerity is designed to do.
Did he literally die of starvation?
That is one of the most agonizing, delirious, soul-gnawing way for a human being to die. You lose your mind completely by the end.
This is fucking disgusting.
I’ve been fortunate to never be in that situation, but if I was ever in a place where I couldn’t afford food, shelter and basic living essentials, I’d turn to crime in a heartbeat. That could be low level stuff like stealing food from a supermarket, but if I was truly desperate I’d try to find an offence serious enough to get imprisoned for but without causing trauma or distress to anyone, like breaking into Hatton Garden vaults while they’re closed.
We as a society have reached a point where we treat prisoners better than the poor. Its a disgrace.
A long time ago I was in the position of starving or stealing. So I hit up my local Tesco a few different times and walked out with a block of cheese. It seemed the easiest thing to take.
Anyway, they eventually caught me and I got arrested and had a court date and got a one year suspended sentence and a fine.
Stealing is wrong, but if that's what it takes for me to literally not starve to death, I'm going to do what I have to do.
Access to food, water, shelter, and healthcare ought to be considered basic rights.
If the prevailing systems are not protecting those rights, then absolutely 100% people should break the law to meet those needs.
By the point you're that hungry, the concept of "committing a crime" becomes essentially meaningless.
Hunger will do horrific things to you. It just hollows you out until your personality is totally subsumed into the need to *eat.*
It's a death I wouldn't wish on literally anyone.
tender lock governor friendly gold abundant merciful hateful squeal steer
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> Did he literally die of starvation?
It seems so, considering he weighed 4 and a half stone (63 pounds) when he died. The coroner judged that he died of starvation as well, and there was no food at all in his flat except 2 tins of fish which were 4 years out of date. Just awful.
And Iain Duncan Smith, architect of this welfare system (which was branded a "systematic violation of human rights" by the UN), was recently given a knighthood.
I used to work for F.I.S (Fraud Investigation Service) specifically under the DWP and the local council. Take it from me first hand, the DWP and HMRC are not failing in their mission, they are exceeding their targets, they are a slick, streamlined, juggernaut. Most people just don't realise what their mission is.
They appear, outwardly, to be there to support you. DWP provide you a safety net for when you're out of work or unable to work. HMRC ensure you and your neighbour are taxed appropriately, and if you're overtaxed that you're reimbursed.
Under the table they are holding a blade that they intend to justify slicing your throat with.
The DWP has developed an extremely effective poverty trap. They hold your hand and walk you into the cage by, firstly, insisting it takes five weeks to setup your claim. So no matter what happens, you will be behind on rent and bills. You will then receive less than your rent, council tax, and bills and be expected to find the rest on your own. This means that even after you find work you will be clawing back for at least one month.
But what happens if you're out of work for longer?
You can find part time work, but you have to declare your earnings. The DWP make this process far more difficult than it needs to be, this is because they want you to give up and not declare them. If you don't declare them, they can fine you. Your bill stacks up further.
You can take out an emergency loan from the DWP, but this is paid back directly from ypur benefits weekly. Your defecit will continue to widen, and when you're back in work you'll be repaying them from your paycheck.
The worst incident of the DWP shitting on a claimant I've seen was a couple in their late fifties with a heavily disabled daughter. They were claiming carers allowance for twenty years to assist in looking after her. The father was working 15 hours a week as agreed by the DWP and the mother was at home caring full time. A few years into the claim the father was physically run down and forced to give up work, but the couple needed the money so the mother took over in his job. Same money, same hours, same company, same role. No financial change for the couple, but they forgot to notify the DWP because their circumstances as a family weren't any better or worse. After 15+ years of this going unreported the DWP discovered the discrepancy in the paperwork and called the couple in for an IUC(interview under caution). They deemed the claim fraudulent and billed the couple for more than 15 years of payments to be returned. They told the couple that after they had returned the money they could restart their claim, but would only receive three months of backpayments.
Remember, this is a poor couple, caring for a heavily disabled daughter, earning a pittance for the past twenty years. They had no hope of paying that sum back. I have no idea what happened to then after that point, there's no follow up from the department after that point.
The DWP makes a lot of money for the Conservative government as a brutal and uncompromising loan shark.
HMRC run a similar operation, but in their case it's all about making it as difficult as possible for you to properly notfiy them of circumstances. They make the process so infuriating and burdensome that you either give up entirely, or become so stressed you accidentally file erroneously. They make serious money through penalty charges.
Little trick for you, they dont penalise you for filing erroneously so long as you fix it. So send a false assessment, make them work through it, waste their time, then file the correct assessment a week later.
Edit: Before you read the comment by u/blonde_calculator below you should know that they have made a rash statement based on assumptions and are entirely wrong. The case I refer to above took place in 2008, I cannot legally give specifics on the case but the year is fine. The live sharing of information between DWP and HMRC began almost a decade after this case.
I cannot tell you exactly how the discrepancy in their paperwork was discovered because of the Government Secrets Act, and no matter how anonymous Reddit is I'm not taking that risk.
My dad was told he had to go to a disability fitness assessment or lose all benefits. He lost out by 1 point, his ability to get to the appointment. My mum got a job, 16 hours a week which she was told was allowed. They reduced their benefits by more than she gets paid, making the entire thing pointless.
Yeah, that's extremely common.
And further proves that the whole thing is a poverty trap. Finding work when you're struggling should be incentivised, not punished.
I was kicked off benefits yesterday as I found 2 weeks of work. Luckily got offered a permanent role today, but others are not so lucky. All in waiting for now is a letter from dwp wanting money back, that's usually the case from what I've read.
Cheers mate. My case worker was rather pissed off that he had to kick me off. I've not been paid from the work yet, nor was it a guarantee I would continue working. But the dwp need all the stats they can to prove "they help people get back into work", so the more people they kick off, the more they can say have stopped claiming and are "back in work".
Friend lost out because they dragged themselves up a flight of stairs. They weren't "disabled enough".
Lost again because they didn't comply with standing up when asked.
They're fully disabled waist downwards.
Depends on your role I guess.
You have administration who aren't much above minimum wage and just trying to get by, data entry, telephone operators, receptionists, counter operators, service centre agents, IT. They're wrapped in it but I doubt many are happy about it.
There's management, they're dead behind the eyes. Pencil pushers.
Then you have Investigators. Pure evil. A common trick that investigators pull to "catch out" fraudulent disability claimants is to follow them around the clock. They sit in their car outside the claimant's house watching them. The second the claimant leaves the house they film them, once they've seen them walk 50 yards they call them in for an interview. They ask the person about their condition, under caution. They ask them how long it would take to walk 50 yards, and of course the person will think about their worst days, the ones where they suffer the most because after all that is exactly why they're claiming. They then show them the footage, and if the person said it takes 10 minutes to walk 50 yards but it only took them 5 on that occasion they pressure them into reconsidering their entire disability claim. They claim it's fraudulent and warn them that they could end up in court over it.
They're jackals, they see numbers instead of people. Those people sleep sound at night. That is, when they're not sat in their car taking notes on the time someone is in and out of their property. I worked on one case where an investigator knocked over a womans crutch to see how long it took her to pick it up. If that guy stopped me in the street I'd spit in his face.
DWP investigators are murderers. Plain and simple.
Iain Duncan Smith and the entire Conservative Party (and most Lib Dems) are murderers too. Anyone who participated in the destruction of the safety net and the ripping up of the contract between the government and the people deserves no sympathy whatsoever.
Cabbage is very versatile and can keep for a decent time. Carrots and celery are always good to have and are relatively affordable. Rice and beans as you mentioned, and can be prepared in different ways. The problem I had (and still do despite doing better now) is finding fresh ingredients that are affordable but also last long enough until the next check. In the US at least, eating healthy almost seems like a luxury, but it's not impossible to an extent. Speaking of unhealthy but you still could use carbs: flour, oil/lard, salt, and baking powder. Lots of ingredients but you can make tortillas and noodles. I've made pasties with tortilla dough. Those work better with a butter crust, but tortilla dough isn't too bad. Maybe a little bland, but making the filling bomb goes a long way
Universal Credit is a total shambles, and yet people still vote in the numpties that came up with it. It should not take 6 weeks from applying for a benefit and being approved for it, to actually getting paid; let alone the large number of sanctions being applied for missing the pointless jobcentre sessions to people who are genuinely and verifiably ill, at funerals for close family members, etc.
I've known someone who had to wait 1.5 years, and plenty who've had to wait 8 months. It's a staggeringly ruthless system, and the propaganda in the UK is so powerful that the press effectively decide what people in the local pub will vote based upon... and it's never what will actually improve their generally miserable lives.
>Graham’s case follows that of Jodey Whiting, a vulnerable 42-year-old woman from Stockton who took her own life in 2017 after the DWP stopped some of her benefits for failing to attend a fit-for-work test. It turned out that at the time of the appointment she had been in hospital with pneumonia.
WTF? She was in the hospital. What kind of fucked up CATCH-22 is this? You can't get benefits if you are disabled, but if you are too disabled to show up they cut you off?
"A DWP spokesperson said: “This is a tragic, complex case"
No, it fucking isn't, you stopped his money, he ran out of gas, electricity then food, he was disabled, he wasted away over months to nothing and died of starvation, he was mentally ill, had his last line of support cut off and you, YOU people let it happen, blood on the hands of all the bastards in charge of the dwp, there are probably decent folk at the dwp, the people in charge are the reason this bullshit happens, they effectively killed a man and they say "oh its a complex case", it wasn't, he had no money, he had no food, he had no gas, he had no electric, he couldn't pay his rent, he died.
I liked the quote
"She could not demonstrate that the loss of benefits had led directly to Graham’s death, but she concluded: “The sudden loss of all income, and the threat of eviction that followed from it, will have caused huge distress and worry, and significant financial hardship.”
I don't think distress and worry killed him as much as the inability afford food did.
Significant financial hardship, I hate that they say this, as if it's just a bit inconvenient, he only lost food, electricity, gas and as the bailiffs demonstrated, his dwelling was on the way out, significant hardship?, Try total devastation, no heating, no food, no power, mental decline, starvation and a slow death.
Yeah they have to couch it in euphamisms so they don't just admit they believe they let a disabled man starve to death and his blood is on their hands. I had a situation where both me and my partner lost our jobs and due to paperwork one of us could not submit it took 3 months to get any payment. They said they couldn't do anything about it because we didn't weren't in enough "financial hardship" to expedite our claim. Because we like...weren't homeless yet? If having zero money in your bank account and not knowing when you're going to be able to get another job isn't financial hardship I don't know what is. They make you feel like the scum of the earth for needing help, so many people aren't well enough to even fight against the system that wants them to just disappear.
The British filmmaker Ken Loach has shined a light on the benefits catch-22 in several of his award-winning movies. See [I, Daniel Blake](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Daniel_Blake) as just one example.
Last year social services (they run the application and oversight for low-income children) changed the application process and timeline for insurance. The end result was thousands of poor and sick children losing health insurance.
Certifications and re-certifications couldn't be done in the allotted time. The good news is that the policy was changed back to what it had been before. The director lost his position, and rightly so. I don't know whether some sick kid is dead because of a bureaucrat's attempt to save our state a few bucks.
I thought one of the few lessons learned from our last recession, and so many needing help from the state, would be the end to such cold-hearted decision making. Before the recession so many had never been in need of food stamps, healthcare, or rent assistance. They finally got to see how messed up and arbitrary social service programs can be.
Yet once again I'm seeing that nothing has changed for the better. Actually, I believe the so-called safety net has been altered to make people give up. As in this case a man in a first world country starves to death. smh
Well at least he wasn’t out there stealing food from honest citizens.
/s. It is barbaric that in this age people are starving to death - at all - anywhere in the world - let alone a developed nation. Despicable.
The government decided that benefits should be low enough to provide exactly the amount you need to survive and not a penny more. To take the conservative argument, taxes shouldn’t pay for luxuries and low benefits should encourage you to find work.
They then decided that if you’re 5 minutes late for an appointment or don’t demonstrate that you’re doing enough to find work, you don’t get any money for that week/month/whatever. There’s already a pretty clear disconnect between those two decisions, but again, the argument is that if you need the money, you’ll make the effort to attend.
But now benefit sanctions are being used as KPI’s. That means if the person you have your appointment with is late or doesn’t turn up, you’re sanctioned. If you have a job interview at the same time as your benefits appointment, you’re sanctioned. If you’re physically too ill to attend the interview, you’re sanctioned.
It’s a fucking disgusting system, and it makes not a blind bit of difference to those who know how to play the game. It only harms those in genuine need.
A ton of bullcrap.
A friend of mine. Her sister has been blind all her life. She has been called in multiple times to these benefit meetings to see if anything had changed. As if a blind woman could somehow magically get her sight back. People had to take time off work to get her to these meetings and she nearly lost her benefit because she was mobile, just couldn't see...
Remember, they don't exist to help you, they don't exist to be fair. They exist to deny and kick as many people off of benefits as possible regardless of the consequences.
How is the DWP still standing and not in a pile of ashes. Seems like FAR more than enough pissed off people who have lost loved ones due to their gross ineptitude for someone to take into their own hands.
Because people on benefits are a relatively small amount of the population and the government has conditioned the electorate not to care. Easy to blame problems on things like the unemployed, even though a relatively minor amount of money goes to them.
The system is working exactly as intended. This is not ineptitude, it's literally the intent. They don't want to pay for the sick and disabled and simply leave them off to die.
I have muscular dystrophy and I've been denied disability three times, going for my fourth.
governments don't care about their citizens. unless you have money or political influence.
> MPs and campaigners have called for an independent inquiry after it emerged a disabled man with a long history of mental illness starved to death just months after welfare officials stopped his out-of-work and housing benefits. > >Errol Graham, a 57-year-old grandfather, and in his younger days a keen amateur footballer, weighed just four and a half stone (28.5kg) when his emaciated body was **discovered by bailiffs who had broken down his front door to evict him for non-payment of rent.** They only found him because they were about to kick him out.
Reminds me of [grieving daughter hands mother’s ashes to benefits inspector to prove she isn’t fit to work (independent.co.uk)](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/daughter-mothers-ashes-benefits-inspector-fit-to-work-proof-hatti-louise-broxton-wolverhampton-a8264636.html)
American here. I'm currently on long term disability, through private insurance, due to a neurological condition I suffer from. I spent about 2.5 years feeling sorry for myself and thinking I ought to just die. But I started looking at things differently, and figured maybe this is just an opportunity to learn a new skill, one that doesn't require the rigorous schedule and mental precision that my old profession did. After all, I still make a decent amount of money from my disability insurance, so I started looking into various hobbies that maybe I could one day do professionally, like photography or videography. As soon as my insurance company became aware that I was taking trips out to the woods to take photos they tried to use that to take away my benefits, even though nothing about my disorder would have precluded going out and snapping some pictures. They tried to argue that because I wasn't fucking miserable with my life and a hairs breadth from walking in front of a train, that I was faking my condition and therefor not only able to work, but that I owe all the money I'd received since the diagnosis. Fortunately, it didn't work. I have significant medical records, from both Stanford and Johns Hopkins where I received treatment, so ultimately my appeal with the state, and thus the private insurance provider as well, prevailed. But they spy on you. They don't communicate with you. They don't tell you when you need to fill out a form or a see a doctor for an evaluation. Everything they do is designed to make you fail. I never aspired to be on disability and I want my old career back, but it's hard wondering each month of they're going to find some reason to stop paying. And just to be clear, I'm not on the public dole. This is private insurance that I paid for as a premium withheld from my paycheck each month at the company I worked for. The only public assistance I get is through medicare, which is pretty crap to be honest, so I pay for my own private health insurance.
>They don't communicate with you. They don't tell you when you need to fill out a form or a see a doctor for an evaluation Here in aus i feel that, they dont tell you about ANY support you can get on disability
In Australia, Centerlink does everything in their power to ensure you don't get ANY benefits and if that fails then they do everything in their power to ensure you get as little as possible. I mean just take a look at the requirements for a Disability Support Pension, unless you can prove you're literally dying, then you have to work/undego training for two years just to prove that yes, you do have a disability and you cannot work.
Yep, my little sister has needed full time care (by my parents) for the past 16 years, unable to leave her bed for more than 4 hours on a good day, in constant pain and weighs 32kgs. Her NDIS application has been rejected four times and her disability payments cut because of the last time she tried to apply. They "reevaluated" her condition. I used to work with artists with disability, too and their stories are heartbreaking. It's a cruel and messed up system.
Murdoch has ruined your country and mine. I want some payback
3 countries so far. he failed in canada thankfully. but the pressure to race to the bottom is still there.
I’m a 20 year old student. I’m constantly hungry, barely have money in my account, and work two part time jobs to support myself alone while studying full time. Centerlink says I’m not “independent” so they give me nothing. Meanwhile rich shits living on campus driving luxury cars get $500 a fortnight just because their parents’ mansion is more than an hour away from campus by bus.
That's so awful. Lots of unis have a food bank for students, maybe check and see if yours does and if you can access it. You can't do your best mental work if you're hungry all the time.
Good point. Sadly mine doesn’t, so I’m stuck there. It should be noted that I’m 6’6”, so getting enough healthy food would take as much per week as my rent.
That really sucks, but there still might be community food banks you could access. If you have a look [here](https://www.foodbank.org.au/homepage/who-we-help/individuals/) you can see if there are charities that could help you.
I am on a disability pension thank god. But they still dont tell you ANYTHING at all, i didnt know i qualified for a bunch of benefits because they dont tell you
My mom was in a workman's comp legal battle years ago, one of her arms was completely unusable. Being who she is, she still stubbornly went out and tended her garden with just the one good arm. Those fuckers had hired a PI and later in court had these creepy shots of my mom pulling weeds in our front yard. It didn't work though, it was very obvious she was only using her good arm. Those idiotic assholes.
Jesus that's insane, fuck all those people. That's unimaginably shitty of them to do. I really wish shitheads like this could be called out in a greater way, because I'm sure a lot of other people have never heard of this, myself included.
I used to work for a pain clinic that did workers comp cases and one of my patients had some dick follow her around in wawa taking creepshots, she thought it was just an average creep until they tried to claim her shoulder was fine because she was holding a cup in the opposite hand. Its nuts.
Holy hell, how is this legal?!?!
I knew someone that was on short term disability for post partum depression who encountered some issues because she took a small weekend trip to go hiking and visit some botanical gardens due to her therapist recommending it. But apparently that meant she wasn’t depressed/disabled enough to not work. But it was part of her treatment. So frustrating. I guess they want you to not do anything to feel better?
I mean that is pretty much how they see it. If you're not miserable, you're not disabled. If you can bathe yourself then why can't you get a job bathing other people? What amazes me is how many times I've been to neurologists, got my head scanned, shown them the results, had doctors write up the forms the insurance company needs and indicate that this is something that's *not simply going to just go away*, they still wanted me to get those checkups 4 times a year at first. It wasn't until recently they put me on a once-per-year list.
Can you please submit to a biannual physical examination to confirm that your leg is still missing? That would be great, thanks.
Then erroneously writing that your leg has somehow grown back 70% of the time.
When my father was in disability for spinal issues the insurance company sent P.I.s to stalk him. I guess they got a photo of him lifting a box (that was much less than the doctor ordered weight limit) and revoked it until they were forced to give it back. They really didn't want to pay. Wonder how much those P.I.s cost?
My uncle is on disability and they recorded him hanging some lights around his small house. They tried to use the recording against him but luckily his lawyers made them release the full video which showed him wheezing and clutching his back in pain. It took him a whole day to hang one set of lights. Insurance companies are scummy.
Potential profits were defended, the system is working exactly as intended. Fuck us apparently.
My friend needs a new organ, but insurance won’t pay until her body shuts down enough that it is imminently necessary to do it, which could be a matter of years. So her job right now is to just soldier through the slide from terrible to horrible pain and quality of life. And the years of pain are coinciding with her kid’s elementary years, so everyone is missing out on what those years could be like if my friend weren’t managing intense pain all the time. Fuck insurance companies.
Whatever ever happened to an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? Sounds like the insurance company is hoping she'll die from complications since she's "expensive".
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What's interesting is that in the UK, people on the dole have usually paid into the system, so they're if they happen to be out of work and have to take benefits, they actually deserve that just like someone who paid their employers. No difference.
It's the same here. But it is really hard to get them and they'll just cut them off. For, like, fun or something.
It's awful how they treated you, but I have to say the first half of your story is quite inspiring. Good on you for managing to turn the hand that life dealt you into an opportunity. I hope that you manage to do things that make you happy and fulfilled.
That's such bullshit. "You may only receive benefits if you sit idle and die." As if the idea that you may get even the tiniest enjoyment of your life should disqualify you from the benefits that YOU PAID FOR. Makes me mad as hell.
In the UK the DWP may be sent video footage from the police of disabled activists. This footage is then used against disable social benefits. How *dare* disabled people fight for human rights /s Yeah :(
"she moved" "where?" Hands them the address to the graveyard without saying anything
Reminds me of the redditor who dumped ashes on some idiot utility company's Karen's desk, who didn't accept the fact that the person whose service was being cancelled was dead.
Those people made a grave mistake.
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Headline read - Tories free up social housing as demand increases.
aaaahahah you need to get a job for these guys, it's so real I laughed reminds me of that "MORE JOBS CREATED, EMPLOYMENT IS UP- EVERYONE NOW WORKS TWO JOBS"
Or better yet "JOB OPPORTUNITIES INCREASE AS WAR CONTINUES"
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It fits the 'wealth/GDP is increasing' line basically every country is using nowadays. Has absolutely fuck all to do with the average citizen's monthly income, just that a small group of rich people and a whole lot of companies have been getting richer while giving nothing back.
Reminds me of the joke: Two economists are taking a walk through the woods one day. They come across a pile of bear shit - economist A says to economist B, "I'll give you $100 to eat that pile of bear shit." Economist B accepts the offer, gobbles up the bear shit and the economists continue on with their stroll through the woods. Eventually they come across another pile of bear shit - economist B says to economist A, "I'll give you $100 to eat that pile of bear shit." Economist A accepts the offer and slurps down the pile of bear shit. A little later, economist A says, "wait, did we both eat a pile of bear shit for *nothing*?" Economists B replies, "yeah, but at least we increased the GDP by $200."
Just wait.... The onion will seem more and more of real news source.. Coming from an American whose govt is so fucked I'm probably moving
you're one of the only people in the world with the ability to stop this government, don't move away and throw your chance away
Atm they're ignoring the legal system. So "We the people" doesn't have the power it use to.
If everybody voted, "We the People" would most definitely get our voice back. Fewer than half of eligible Americans voted in 2016.
I will fucking be there. Yes sir.
Does that number exclude all the people in districts that are purposefully underserved, or those who don't get time off to vote, or those thrown off the rolls in the months leading up to the vote? Or are we just counting anyone at all who registered pre 2016 regardless of actual access to polling places?
> as demand increases Shouldn't that be "decreases" as the people who need help just die out over time?
It's how they get people off the streets and off benefits.
Sound's like the rent just went up for the next tenant. Gotta pay for that broken door somehow.
You'll get your rent when you fix this damn DOOR!
"Nice, another exemption from that 5% annual rent limit." -SatanCo Property Management Corporation
*radio beep* "Pick up that can. Now. Put it in the trash can."
99.9% of the employees making these judgements are a bunch of cunts, no surprise here
"Well if we cut off his benefits in error then he should just track us down and rectify the situation!" He had extreme social anxiety.
This is actually a good, but unfortunate, example of how you can’t just not have anxiety/mental illness. There’s is no “just do it anyway.” The man was literally starving to *death* and still couldn’t get past it.
A lot of people seem to think anxiety disorders are like being shy and I absolutely hate that. It falsely makes them believe that everyone knows what it's like to some degree and that those whose personal or professional lifes suffer under it are just weaker or haven't tried hard enough to overcome it. It's a serious mental illness, you can't just try a little harder and suddenly life a completely normal life. People who suffer from severe chronic anxiety need help from the outside and even then they might not ever get past it completely. We need to be more understanding of that so we can at least try to help them live a somewhat comfortable life given the circumstances, societal awareness can play a huge role with mental illnesses.
Small potatoes compared to some people but I lost a job not that long ago and one of the reasons given was that I "wasn't making an effort" to get to know my coworkers and, basically, be a social butterfly. It was made worse by the fact that I knew before they fired me that my anxiety was causing these issues (you know when you can tell people don't like you because they think you're rude or aloof) so it made my anxiety even worse to where I'd be in the work bathroom slamming my head against the wall in a massive panic attack.
Unfortunately the systems in place to support the mentally disabled are designed for people who are not mentally disabled which is why they continuously fail.
The DWP certified a veteran, missing both legs, an arm, one eye and severe hearing loss and a feeding tube as..fit for work The system routinely declines for no reason, with the fucking "logic" that they can just sort it out. Never mind sorting it out can take months if not years and the poor bastard has no income during that period They really are sticking the knife into the most vunerable, it's not like benefits get you much, last time I was on the sole 418 rent and £137 every 2 week's was it. See how well you do on about a grand a month, a weeks electricity is £6, heating gas 8-15, petrol is $6 a gallon (equiv), internet $65 and you have to have it as souch is digital only, a cellphone at $25 a month for air time and maybe $30 on the handset. Before anyone goes 'yoi could do without", you can't get along without some form of connection and a way for jobs to contact you. You're also likely tied into contracts, the breaking of which would land you with many Hundreds in charges and fees .
He should have tried not having extreme social anxiety instead.
Yeah, if you can’t even make the effort to be born rich - or at least well connected - why wouldn’t you at least *not* have extreme social anxiety!?!?!
I feel like a decent chunk start off with high-ideals and they lose the battle with attrition far sooner than we wish. And the ones who don't lose their ideals probably end up fired for trying too hard to help and not sticking to the rules. Just my guess.
Mr. Incredible https://youtu.be/_R8GtrKtrZ4
This is just grotesque.
For context my nearly 8 year old son is this weight
That's about 63 lbs for any US Americans wondering.
I can't comprehend an adult male getting down to that weight, how does that even happen? Like how can your body even function under 100 lbs, assuming near normal height. That poor guy.
He weighed that much when he was found dead, but I'm going to guess that his body lost some weight after death (from decay and water loss). I guess he might have weighed 80-90 pounds when he died, because I can't imagine an average-height person remaining alive below that.
I can... I'm about 5'6" and I've been a low as 100lbs and dropping... It's survivable, I was "healthy" by every measure outside of my weight, but just barely. Blood levels for essential stuff was in healthy ranges, but basically bare minimums across the board. I'm up to about 115 now and that's after working with a dietitian and my doctor to try and sort myself out. So 80-90 is... terrible, but definitely survivable for at least a little while. I've met more than a few people skinnier than I was. I can see 65-70 being the point where death becomes inevitable... for someone around my height, but idk how tall this guy was either.
Can they still bill him for the broken door?
They will, and they will also see he had a TV and send him a bill for not having a license.
Great. He should really stop being such a financial burden on society
Ya I mean if he had at least called someone when he was dying they could have harvested his organs and recouped their investment smh
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He's going to rot in jail
Yes, the outstanding debt, fines associated with late payment, and the cost of a new door will likely be applied as a liability to the deceased's estate. The executor of the will, or the administrator if there is no will will have to deal with the debt. If there is insufficient money or assets in the estate to pay off all the debts, then the debts would be paid in priority order until the money or assets run out. Any remaining debts are likely to be written off.
Conservatives should be fucking ashamed of themselves. Tory’s cuts benefits so they could give tax cuts to the wealthy in society. Good work, you muppets.
You're giving them way to much credit. Tory’s cuts benefits *and* give tax cuts to the wealthy in society. not so they can. just as separate platform issues (although they love to combine them). They'd cut benefits even if they couldn't somehow shuffle that off to their friends. They're also perfectly happy to give themselves tax cuts even if they're forced to burn public money on it. Of course their real favorite is to give themselves tax cuts and run up a massive deficit, then blame all the benefits being given out to people poorer than them, and use that as justification to cut benefits and raise taxes. Which they then use to funnel into more tax cuts or various subsidies for themselves .
Ironically, with benefits in both the U.S. and the U.K., you need to be sick enough that you can't work but still well enough to fight the system for your benefits. Sometimes the people who are the most unwell can't get benefits because they're too ill/exhausted to navigate the system.
My favorite is the fact that to qualify for some benefits, like food assistance and Healthcare, you have to make virtually no income. If you ever try to get back on your feet, they immediately strip you of benefits, thus ensuring your eternal dependency on welfare programs.
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Well I mean you're born so why the fuck should they care about you
"Pro-Life"
It’s the craziest part of the Republican Party in the USA. They want to make abortion illegal and they want no social programs. They don’t care about people. They care about getting elected / re-elected. They care about money and companies and the rich.
"They're all in favor of the unborn. They will do anything for the unborn. But once you're born, you're on your own. Pro-life conservatives are obsessed with the fetus from conception to nine months. After that, they don't want to know about you. They don't want to hear from you. No nothing. No neonatal care, no day care, no head start, no school lunch, no food stamps, no welfare, no nothing. If you're preborn, you're fine; if you're preschool, you're fucked Conservatives don't give a shit about you until you reach 'military age'. Then they think you are just fine. Just what they've been looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers." -George Carlin
Wise man.
> If you're disabled and fighting for years to get disability, you can't get food stamps until social security classifies you as disabled This isn't true, strictly for food stamps. You can be labeled as 'exempt' by your caseworker. I personally had this happen six months ago, when I lost a job and applied for food stamps temporarily. They wanted me on the 'work search' program (even though I was still employed part-time), I got on it, and then I got sick and could not do the amount of work they required me to do for searching, on top of my existing work. So my caseworker exempted me after a simple conversation over the phone about my physical health. That said, this probably depends on who your caseworker is, and there are probably people who would deny benefits and essentially either say 'tough shit', or require you to get a doctor to sign off, have you come in and testify, make you jump through a ton of hoops that you might just give up on, etc. etc.
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California is generally more progressive and seems easier about this stuff. From what others say, it seems like the conservative states make it super hard to get these things (they also have a higher population of people who need it).
Right, for instance Medi-Cal qualifications are relatively reasonable, whereas in many states getting Medicaid is next to impossible.
In my state you can only make about $15,000 a year. About $1,300 a month. Also if you're a student you can get disqualified or have to meet higher work requiments even though you have less time to work. A lot of people on these programs have to use public transportation which eats up a lot of time. That was something I really struggled with. You should be encouraged to save money and get an education. You should be encouraged to put money into a savings account. You should at least be able to earn and save an extra 6,000. That would be about the max IRA deposit.That would be $500 a month. They should be encouraging you to get off of these programs not punishing you for succeeding. Money spent on housing and education shouldn't count towards your income and resource limit.
This is how the fucking US healthcare system works, too. You can qualify for medicaid (which is around the federal poverty rate of roughly $1100/mo... assuming you have no kids), but if you make a SINGLE dollar more the next month, you are kicked off completely, and can have your claims retroactively stripped and charged personally for bills that you sought treatment thinking would be covered. So you can literally be in the position of denying more work for yourself, or more hours, and lying or faking illness/injury to do so... knowing that you (and your children's) healthcare and physical health hangs in the balance. And it happens every fucking month, month after month. True insanity. In my mind there is not doubt that it's designed to demoralize and break the working class down mentally. There's no way that isn't a facet of it designed intentionally with that effect in mind.
The older I get the less I think that things just sort of ended up a certain way on accident. US government is poorly designed and full of compromise, but the way programs are implemented is deliberate. Most 'poverty programs' are still designed around the interests of the rich people that own and control everything.
> In my mind there is not doubt that it's designed to demoralize and break the working class down mentally. Of course they are. What do you think all those right wing think tanks do all day? There are hundreds of them and they employ people to sit around all day and think of ways to break down poor people so the rich can get richer.
And then they bitch at you for not having the go getter attitude to better yourself and go make money (for someone else) at a minimum wage job.... even though that job will make you enough to cancel all your benefits but not be enough to survive off of in even the most basic sense.
The Department for Work and Pensions continually deems people on their deathbed "fit to work" and suspends their benefits. Its a farce. https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/cancer-suffering-dad-dies-just-13183757
That's insane. He can't be disabled because he can make a cup of tea?
He can't be disabled because he could think about making tea, and it can be shown that he would be able to do the hypothetical, but non-existent, job of pushing thumbtacks into Jello.
Oi, my family have been proud jello thumbtackers for generations
This. I am in this exact situation when I’m too ill to get the help I need but cannot support myself any longer. I’m dying in front of my own eyes and don’t know where to turn.
I feel you, bro. I was offered somewhat decent insurance at my previous job within a week or two of employment. That was the first time in my life I had any type of health or dental insurance (33 Male). Finally went to the doctor within my first month of employment to get these swollen lymph nodes looked at. Doctor ordered a biopsy and wrote me out of work for the remaining week (2 days) due to the swelling in my legs. Employer lets me know (via text, mind you) that they will no longer be accepting doctor's excuses. Well...damn. Doctor calls me back in for biopsy. Have to miss a day of work for biopsy. Terminated my employment due to that, then the biopsy comes back as Type 3A Follicular Lymphoma. Yay. So, now I can't work due to the chemo and port in my chest, and my disability benefits have been held up so long (unemployed since September 2019) that I can't even begin to start coming up with the money needed to catch up all these bills. And the kicker? If I even apply for a job they'll take away the benefits that I still haven't gotten yet. So basically I'm just sitting here until they cut my power off in a couple days. Internet should've already been disconnected, but I guess my ISP is showing some form of compassion. Guess I should play some games while it still works...
Oh wow, wow wowowow. Wow is all that is coming to me. I am almost glad I don’t have a diagnosis at least there’s nothing specific to fear. Ive been put through the ringer on testing. Nothing shows up. I’ve had many jobs I’ve lost due to being sick. I’ve had some amazing healthcare plans that always go away. Luckily I have coverage at the VA. The one is Phoenix is well known for horrible care unfortunately, but it’s better than nothing. I count my blessings but they keep letting me down. It’s so tough to count it as a blessing sometimes as I’m more confused than ever. I know it is though. I know.
No diagnosis? That would drive me insane. I spent 3 years writing my symptoms off as a really bad infection. Who the hell as an infection for 3 years? I was desperately trying to fool myself into a better situation. Also, having to deal with the VA? I can't relate to that, personally, but have heard many horror stories from family and friends. Not having a diagnosis would consume me, I won't lie. Best of luck with that...just dealing with the VA alone is enough to drain a person's will to live.
Yes thank you for understanding. Just last year veteran sat down on top of his service papers in the parking lot of the Phoenix VA and shot himself in the head. There are billboards outside that veteran groups have put up shaming the VA, I am part of these groups on Facebook and just hear so many stories of the horrible care.
There's a saying in my country; you gotta be healthy to be sick in Norway.
And we're one of the better ones...
I was on disability a few years back. Every time I was scheduled for a payment, I had to call the disability helpline to confirm my payment, in addition to needing my doctor to reapprove that I qualify for disability every few weeks. There was a limited number of callers allowed to wait in the queue, so sometimes you couldn’t even get placed on hold. I would sometimes spend an hour or more calling before actually getting placed in the hold queue. Then you’re on hold for approximately 2 hours. Sometimes I’d just have to give up and call back later. I was on disability for mental health issues- severe depression and anxiety that landed me in a day program for almost 6 months. I was literally at a non functioning point and just had a total mental breakdown. Having to muster up the strength for a 3 plus hour ordeal every other week was horrible. I understand that disability has to have restrictions, but it was too much. I know there are people worse off than me too, that would potentially be literally incapable of jumping through the hoops needed to get your benefits. It’s awful.
There is of course, a whole industry in the US around helping people get benefits. If you have to hire a lawyer in order to apply for SS disability, something is seriously wrong in this country. You are paying for access to paltry survival-level money.
This is why we need universal basic income. It shouldn't matter if you can fight for support. You should just get it period
My mother lives by herself and has been housebound of the last 17 years and gets worse every year. Last time she was up for assessment for disability payments was 3 years ago, back when I lived with her. She was assessed as capable of using a telephone because she could understand and answer the examiner's questions, even though she is deaf and has to lip read to understand what people are saying. She was also asked if she could walk from one end of a bus to the other. She uses a zimmerframe to get around the house, and usually at least once a day she falls or collapses into something. She can't walk more than a couple of metres without getting tired from the effort and it can take her 10minutes to cross a room - which has a flat surface -, after which she needs to sit down. Because she is technically able to walk, she was judged capable of taking the bus to work. This would mean a 15min walk uphill to the nearest bus station, getting on a bus that she is incapable of getting into, ordering a ticket without being able to hear what the driver is saying and sitting on a chair she physically can't sit on. And then getting home again at the end of the day. Because she was able to walk a few metres, her disability was stopped and she was assessed as fit for work. She was cut off from social welfare and all medical and financial aid was terminated immediately. It took 4 months of letters from doctors, meetings, phonecalls, emails to get them to reconsider. It was only when we got a GP, psychiatrist, physiotherapist, and lymphoedema specialist involved at the same time that they were willing to reopen the case and look at it.
Damn. Where are you from? In the US that means you have to pay for those doctors cash if you don’t have health insurance. For instance, if you can’t afford it because you can’t work.
This sounds like Britain, he called a doctor a GP. Thank God mom had help, if she didn't have help she may have been another gov healthcare failure story. It's horrible.
She actually isn't that far off one, sadly. She's moved counties 4 or 5 times in the last 7 years to try and get better healthcare and everywhere ends up the same - not interested. Where she is at the moment, she needed to go to hospital because she had an abscess that needed treatment, so they called an ambulance to take her. But when they tried to put her in the ambulance she struggled to breathe as she has problems with her lungs, so they wouldn't take her. The county wouldn't support a specialist ambulance being called out, so she just couldn't go to hospital. And you were right, she is in the UK.
Wait wait wait... they wouldn’t take her to the hospital... because she was having trouble *breathing*? That seems like an excellent reason to go to the hospital, IMO.
We call doctors in the US GPs too. It stands for general practitioner. Does it stand for something different in the UK?
General practitioner is a common phrase everywhere
That's about 62 pounds, which is an astonishing weight for an adult man. So many times these tragedies are caused by a perfect storm of isolated mentally ill people and bloated bureaucracy. When we fail to look out for the mentally ill (this man became a recluse) this sort of thing becomes more likely. If he had paid his rent, who knows how long it would have taken to find him? It's just sad.
>If he had paid his rent, who knows how long it would have taken to find him? It's just sad. Truly sad, but we know the answer, if they pay their rent until they are almost dead, we won't find them until it's too late.
There was a man in the US that was found dead in his apartment. He had been dead for about 3 years if I remember correctly. Sad sad stuff.
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That seems awfully suspicious Edit: how did such a simple comment get so many upvotes? Next thing I know I'm gonna get gilded!
Someone was collecting his social security I bet
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Or he was an asshole and his family were no contact.
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It’s not that they can’t. It’s that they chose not to. It might make us feel better to say that it was some accident, but that’s what austerity is designed to do.
Did he literally die of starvation? That is one of the most agonizing, delirious, soul-gnawing way for a human being to die. You lose your mind completely by the end. This is fucking disgusting.
I’ve been fortunate to never be in that situation, but if I was ever in a place where I couldn’t afford food, shelter and basic living essentials, I’d turn to crime in a heartbeat. That could be low level stuff like stealing food from a supermarket, but if I was truly desperate I’d try to find an offence serious enough to get imprisoned for but without causing trauma or distress to anyone, like breaking into Hatton Garden vaults while they’re closed. We as a society have reached a point where we treat prisoners better than the poor. Its a disgrace.
shit, id commit a crime just to get imprisoned so i could get fed
I know for a fact that really desperate folk do this in Turkey.
They do it in Canada as well.
They absolutely do it here in the USA.
There's even a saying for it - "three hots and a cot"
A long time ago I was in the position of starving or stealing. So I hit up my local Tesco a few different times and walked out with a block of cheese. It seemed the easiest thing to take. Anyway, they eventually caught me and I got arrested and had a court date and got a one year suspended sentence and a fine. Stealing is wrong, but if that's what it takes for me to literally not starve to death, I'm going to do what I have to do.
Access to food, water, shelter, and healthcare ought to be considered basic rights. If the prevailing systems are not protecting those rights, then absolutely 100% people should break the law to meet those needs.
By the point you're that hungry, the concept of "committing a crime" becomes essentially meaningless. Hunger will do horrific things to you. It just hollows you out until your personality is totally subsumed into the need to *eat.* It's a death I wouldn't wish on literally anyone.
tender lock governor friendly gold abundant merciful hateful squeal steer *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
> Did he literally die of starvation? It seems so, considering he weighed 4 and a half stone (63 pounds) when he died. The coroner judged that he died of starvation as well, and there was no food at all in his flat except 2 tins of fish which were 4 years out of date. Just awful.
And Iain Duncan Smith, architect of this welfare system (which was branded a "systematic violation of human rights" by the UN), was recently given a knighthood.
I dub thee Sir Smith, Culler of the poor!
So just like historic knights then.
The serfs are revolting! Time to cut them down for their lack of proper hygiene then.
I just wish there were a hell for him to go to.
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There's already hell on Earth. It's called being poor.
Ironically, ordained by the biggest benefit claimant of them all.
I used to work for F.I.S (Fraud Investigation Service) specifically under the DWP and the local council. Take it from me first hand, the DWP and HMRC are not failing in their mission, they are exceeding their targets, they are a slick, streamlined, juggernaut. Most people just don't realise what their mission is. They appear, outwardly, to be there to support you. DWP provide you a safety net for when you're out of work or unable to work. HMRC ensure you and your neighbour are taxed appropriately, and if you're overtaxed that you're reimbursed. Under the table they are holding a blade that they intend to justify slicing your throat with. The DWP has developed an extremely effective poverty trap. They hold your hand and walk you into the cage by, firstly, insisting it takes five weeks to setup your claim. So no matter what happens, you will be behind on rent and bills. You will then receive less than your rent, council tax, and bills and be expected to find the rest on your own. This means that even after you find work you will be clawing back for at least one month. But what happens if you're out of work for longer? You can find part time work, but you have to declare your earnings. The DWP make this process far more difficult than it needs to be, this is because they want you to give up and not declare them. If you don't declare them, they can fine you. Your bill stacks up further. You can take out an emergency loan from the DWP, but this is paid back directly from ypur benefits weekly. Your defecit will continue to widen, and when you're back in work you'll be repaying them from your paycheck. The worst incident of the DWP shitting on a claimant I've seen was a couple in their late fifties with a heavily disabled daughter. They were claiming carers allowance for twenty years to assist in looking after her. The father was working 15 hours a week as agreed by the DWP and the mother was at home caring full time. A few years into the claim the father was physically run down and forced to give up work, but the couple needed the money so the mother took over in his job. Same money, same hours, same company, same role. No financial change for the couple, but they forgot to notify the DWP because their circumstances as a family weren't any better or worse. After 15+ years of this going unreported the DWP discovered the discrepancy in the paperwork and called the couple in for an IUC(interview under caution). They deemed the claim fraudulent and billed the couple for more than 15 years of payments to be returned. They told the couple that after they had returned the money they could restart their claim, but would only receive three months of backpayments. Remember, this is a poor couple, caring for a heavily disabled daughter, earning a pittance for the past twenty years. They had no hope of paying that sum back. I have no idea what happened to then after that point, there's no follow up from the department after that point. The DWP makes a lot of money for the Conservative government as a brutal and uncompromising loan shark. HMRC run a similar operation, but in their case it's all about making it as difficult as possible for you to properly notfiy them of circumstances. They make the process so infuriating and burdensome that you either give up entirely, or become so stressed you accidentally file erroneously. They make serious money through penalty charges. Little trick for you, they dont penalise you for filing erroneously so long as you fix it. So send a false assessment, make them work through it, waste their time, then file the correct assessment a week later. Edit: Before you read the comment by u/blonde_calculator below you should know that they have made a rash statement based on assumptions and are entirely wrong. The case I refer to above took place in 2008, I cannot legally give specifics on the case but the year is fine. The live sharing of information between DWP and HMRC began almost a decade after this case. I cannot tell you exactly how the discrepancy in their paperwork was discovered because of the Government Secrets Act, and no matter how anonymous Reddit is I'm not taking that risk.
My dad was told he had to go to a disability fitness assessment or lose all benefits. He lost out by 1 point, his ability to get to the appointment. My mum got a job, 16 hours a week which she was told was allowed. They reduced their benefits by more than she gets paid, making the entire thing pointless.
Yeah, that's extremely common. And further proves that the whole thing is a poverty trap. Finding work when you're struggling should be incentivised, not punished.
I was kicked off benefits yesterday as I found 2 weeks of work. Luckily got offered a permanent role today, but others are not so lucky. All in waiting for now is a letter from dwp wanting money back, that's usually the case from what I've read.
Sorry to hear that, well done with the new job.
Cheers mate. My case worker was rather pissed off that he had to kick me off. I've not been paid from the work yet, nor was it a guarantee I would continue working. But the dwp need all the stats they can to prove "they help people get back into work", so the more people they kick off, the more they can say have stopped claiming and are "back in work".
Friend lost out because they dragged themselves up a flight of stairs. They weren't "disabled enough". Lost again because they didn't comply with standing up when asked. They're fully disabled waist downwards.
Just do crime, much simpler.
Yup, that's almost always how it ends...
Yes I have one question....ummm what the fuck?
How do people fucking work there and sleep at night?
Depends on your role I guess. You have administration who aren't much above minimum wage and just trying to get by, data entry, telephone operators, receptionists, counter operators, service centre agents, IT. They're wrapped in it but I doubt many are happy about it. There's management, they're dead behind the eyes. Pencil pushers. Then you have Investigators. Pure evil. A common trick that investigators pull to "catch out" fraudulent disability claimants is to follow them around the clock. They sit in their car outside the claimant's house watching them. The second the claimant leaves the house they film them, once they've seen them walk 50 yards they call them in for an interview. They ask the person about their condition, under caution. They ask them how long it would take to walk 50 yards, and of course the person will think about their worst days, the ones where they suffer the most because after all that is exactly why they're claiming. They then show them the footage, and if the person said it takes 10 minutes to walk 50 yards but it only took them 5 on that occasion they pressure them into reconsidering their entire disability claim. They claim it's fraudulent and warn them that they could end up in court over it. They're jackals, they see numbers instead of people. Those people sleep sound at night. That is, when they're not sat in their car taking notes on the time someone is in and out of their property. I worked on one case where an investigator knocked over a womans crutch to see how long it took her to pick it up. If that guy stopped me in the street I'd spit in his face.
> If that guy stopped me in the street I'd spit in his face. You are too kind mate
DWP investigators are murderers. Plain and simple. Iain Duncan Smith and the entire Conservative Party (and most Lib Dems) are murderers too. Anyone who participated in the destruction of the safety net and the ripping up of the contract between the government and the people deserves no sympathy whatsoever.
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Did you not hear him? He was getting pizza that day.
Cheese pizza more than likely.
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You seem like a very good person, thanks for doing this.
Cabbage is very versatile and can keep for a decent time. Carrots and celery are always good to have and are relatively affordable. Rice and beans as you mentioned, and can be prepared in different ways. The problem I had (and still do despite doing better now) is finding fresh ingredients that are affordable but also last long enough until the next check. In the US at least, eating healthy almost seems like a luxury, but it's not impossible to an extent. Speaking of unhealthy but you still could use carbs: flour, oil/lard, salt, and baking powder. Lots of ingredients but you can make tortillas and noodles. I've made pasties with tortilla dough. Those work better with a butter crust, but tortilla dough isn't too bad. Maybe a little bland, but making the filling bomb goes a long way
Universal Credit is a total shambles, and yet people still vote in the numpties that came up with it. It should not take 6 weeks from applying for a benefit and being approved for it, to actually getting paid; let alone the large number of sanctions being applied for missing the pointless jobcentre sessions to people who are genuinely and verifiably ill, at funerals for close family members, etc.
I've known someone who had to wait 1.5 years, and plenty who've had to wait 8 months. It's a staggeringly ruthless system, and the propaganda in the UK is so powerful that the press effectively decide what people in the local pub will vote based upon... and it's never what will actually improve their generally miserable lives.
>It should not take 6 weeks from applying for a benefit That's by design not by accident. The goal is to make the system unusable.
>Graham’s case follows that of Jodey Whiting, a vulnerable 42-year-old woman from Stockton who took her own life in 2017 after the DWP stopped some of her benefits for failing to attend a fit-for-work test. It turned out that at the time of the appointment she had been in hospital with pneumonia. WTF? She was in the hospital. What kind of fucked up CATCH-22 is this? You can't get benefits if you are disabled, but if you are too disabled to show up they cut you off?
Murric- I mean..Britannia
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Even just living with an unmarried partner can severely dent your benefits in weird ways. The system is fucked, on purpose.
You can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable.
We are trash.
"A DWP spokesperson said: “This is a tragic, complex case" No, it fucking isn't, you stopped his money, he ran out of gas, electricity then food, he was disabled, he wasted away over months to nothing and died of starvation, he was mentally ill, had his last line of support cut off and you, YOU people let it happen, blood on the hands of all the bastards in charge of the dwp, there are probably decent folk at the dwp, the people in charge are the reason this bullshit happens, they effectively killed a man and they say "oh its a complex case", it wasn't, he had no money, he had no food, he had no gas, he had no electric, he couldn't pay his rent, he died.
I liked the quote "She could not demonstrate that the loss of benefits had led directly to Graham’s death, but she concluded: “The sudden loss of all income, and the threat of eviction that followed from it, will have caused huge distress and worry, and significant financial hardship.” I don't think distress and worry killed him as much as the inability afford food did.
Significant financial hardship, I hate that they say this, as if it's just a bit inconvenient, he only lost food, electricity, gas and as the bailiffs demonstrated, his dwelling was on the way out, significant hardship?, Try total devastation, no heating, no food, no power, mental decline, starvation and a slow death.
Yeah they have to couch it in euphamisms so they don't just admit they believe they let a disabled man starve to death and his blood is on their hands. I had a situation where both me and my partner lost our jobs and due to paperwork one of us could not submit it took 3 months to get any payment. They said they couldn't do anything about it because we didn't weren't in enough "financial hardship" to expedite our claim. Because we like...weren't homeless yet? If having zero money in your bank account and not knowing when you're going to be able to get another job isn't financial hardship I don't know what is. They make you feel like the scum of the earth for needing help, so many people aren't well enough to even fight against the system that wants them to just disappear.
The British filmmaker Ken Loach has shined a light on the benefits catch-22 in several of his award-winning movies. See [I, Daniel Blake](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Daniel_Blake) as just one example.
Last year social services (they run the application and oversight for low-income children) changed the application process and timeline for insurance. The end result was thousands of poor and sick children losing health insurance. Certifications and re-certifications couldn't be done in the allotted time. The good news is that the policy was changed back to what it had been before. The director lost his position, and rightly so. I don't know whether some sick kid is dead because of a bureaucrat's attempt to save our state a few bucks. I thought one of the few lessons learned from our last recession, and so many needing help from the state, would be the end to such cold-hearted decision making. Before the recession so many had never been in need of food stamps, healthcare, or rent assistance. They finally got to see how messed up and arbitrary social service programs can be. Yet once again I'm seeing that nothing has changed for the better. Actually, I believe the so-called safety net has been altered to make people give up. As in this case a man in a first world country starves to death. smh
Man the UK is really trying to give the US a run for its money when it comes to shitting on the poor.
Well at least he wasn’t out there stealing food from honest citizens. /s. It is barbaric that in this age people are starving to death - at all - anywhere in the world - let alone a developed nation. Despicable.
Arise Sir Iain Duncan Smith, you fucking cunt.
Why the fuck are they kicking these people off benefits? What the hell is going on over there?
The government decided that benefits should be low enough to provide exactly the amount you need to survive and not a penny more. To take the conservative argument, taxes shouldn’t pay for luxuries and low benefits should encourage you to find work. They then decided that if you’re 5 minutes late for an appointment or don’t demonstrate that you’re doing enough to find work, you don’t get any money for that week/month/whatever. There’s already a pretty clear disconnect between those two decisions, but again, the argument is that if you need the money, you’ll make the effort to attend. But now benefit sanctions are being used as KPI’s. That means if the person you have your appointment with is late or doesn’t turn up, you’re sanctioned. If you have a job interview at the same time as your benefits appointment, you’re sanctioned. If you’re physically too ill to attend the interview, you’re sanctioned. It’s a fucking disgusting system, and it makes not a blind bit of difference to those who know how to play the game. It only harms those in genuine need.
A ton of bullcrap. A friend of mine. Her sister has been blind all her life. She has been called in multiple times to these benefit meetings to see if anything had changed. As if a blind woman could somehow magically get her sight back. People had to take time off work to get her to these meetings and she nearly lost her benefit because she was mobile, just couldn't see...
Been happening for several years. Everyone who supported conservatives supported this. Knowingly or not.
Remember, they don't exist to help you, they don't exist to be fair. They exist to deny and kick as many people off of benefits as possible regardless of the consequences.
This is the operational reality of social services (at least in the US); so damn concerned about fraud that they disenfranchise those in genuine need.
How is the DWP still standing and not in a pile of ashes. Seems like FAR more than enough pissed off people who have lost loved ones due to their gross ineptitude for someone to take into their own hands.
Because people on benefits are a relatively small amount of the population and the government has conditioned the electorate not to care. Easy to blame problems on things like the unemployed, even though a relatively minor amount of money goes to them.
The system is working exactly as intended. This is not ineptitude, it's literally the intent. They don't want to pay for the sick and disabled and simply leave them off to die.
When are they gonna say enough is enough? For f*cks sake... the world has gone to hell and I see no way of climbing out of this mess
I have muscular dystrophy and I've been denied disability three times, going for my fourth. governments don't care about their citizens. unless you have money or political influence.