Demedicalising illness and De-professionalising doctors
Jan 19, 2021 11:50:19 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jan 19, 2021 11:50:19 GMT
The NHS and welfare state are being picked apart, demedicalising illness and de-professionalising doctors.
Rogue company Unum’s profiteering hand in the government’s work, health and disability green paper
politicsandinsights.org/2016/11/29/rogue-company-unum-had-a-profiteering-hand-in-the-governments-work-health-and-disability-green-paper/
I wrote an extensive critique of the recent government green paper on work, health and disability. I mentioned that a government advisor, who is a specialist in labour economics and econometrics, has proposed scrapping all Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) sickness and disability benefits.
Matthew Oakley, a senior researcher at the Social Market Foundation, recently published a report entitled Closing the gap: creating a framework for tackling the disability employment gap in the UK, in which he proposes abolishing the ESA Support Group.
I also said: “Oakely also suggests considering a “role that a form of privately run social insurance could play in both increasing benefit generosity and improving the support that individuals get to manage their conditions and move back to work.”
And: “I’m sure the private company Unum (formerly UnumProvident) would jump at the opportunity. Steeped in controversy, with a wake of scandals that entailed the notorious company systematically denying people their disabilty insurance, in 2004, Unum entered into a regulatory settlement agreement (RSA) with insurance regulators in over 40 US states.
The settlement related to Unum’s “mishandling” of disability claims and required the company “to make significant changes in corporate governance, implement revisions to claim procedures and provide for a full re-examination of both reassessed claims and disability insurance claim decisions.”
The company is the top disability insurer in both the United States and United Kingdom. In the US, it has been regarded as one of the two most unscrupulous insurance companies. The rogue company was also accused of cheating thousands of people out of welfare payments in the US. By coincidence, the company has been involved in the design of the UK government’s controversial 2012 Welfare Reform Bill, advising the government on how to cut spending, particularly on disability support. What could possibly go right?“
Of course the vulture capitalist company Unum continues to “mishandle” claims both in the US, in violation of the US Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and here in the UK, denying people incapacity benefit, under employer’s group income protection policy (GIP).
The Reform think tank has also recently proposed scrapping what is left of the disability social security system, in their report Working welfare: a radically new approach to sickness and disability benefits, and has called for the government to set a single rate for all out-of-work benefits and to reform the way sick and disabled people are assessed.
The members of the neoliberal think tank propose that the government should cut the weekly support paid to 1.3 million sick and disabled people in the ESA Support Group from £131 to £73. This is the same amount that people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance receive. However, those people placed in the Support Group after assessment have been deemed by the state as unlikely to be able to work again in the foreseeable future. It would therefore be very difficult to justify this proposed cut, given the additional needs that disabled people have, which is historically recognised, and empirically verified by research.
Yet the authors of the report doggedly insist that having a higher rate of weekly benefit for extremely sick and disabled people encourages them “to stay on sickness benefits rather than move into work.” However, people on sickness benefits don’t move into work because they are too sick to work. Their own doctors and the state (via the work capability assessment) have already established that. Forcing them to work is outrageously tyrannical.
The report recommended savings which result from removing the disability-related additions to the standard allowance should be reinvested in support services and extra costs benefits – Personal Independence Payment (PIP). However the government have ensured that eligibility for that support is rapidly contracting, with the ever-shrinking political and economic re-interpretation of medically defined sickness and disability categories and a significant reduction in what the government deem to be a legitimate exemption from being “incentivised” into work.
Policy change can often be explained by reference to changes in background ideas about the state, society and the individual, held and promoted by influential individuals, groups, political parties and … multinational companies.
It turns out that you can predict such a lot by simply watching the way the wind blows.
The crib sheet
Theresa May’s new director of policy, John Godfrey, is a keen advocate of what, in his last job, at financial services giant Legal and General, he called “Beveridge 2.0”: using technology to introduce new forms of “social insurance”.
Godfrey told a campaigning group, the Financial Inclusion Commission last year that the systems used to deliver “auto-enrolment”, the scheme that ensures all low-income workers have a pension, could also be used to help the public insure themselves against “unexpected events”.
“There is a clear lesson from auto-enrolment that if you have a plumbing network or an infrastructure that works, that auto-enrolment infrastructure could be used for other things which would encourage financial inclusion: things like, for example, life cover, income protection and effective and very genuine personal contributory benefits for things like unemployment and sickness,” he said.
“They can be delivered at good value if there is mass participation through either soft compulsion or good behavioural economics.”
Note the context shift in the use of the term “inclusion”, which was originally deemed a democratic right, now it’s being discussed narrowly in terms of soft compulsion and individual responsibility. And an exchange of money. Subtext: inclusion is only for those who can pay for it.
A report published by the Adam Smith Institute as far back as 1995 – The Fortune Account – also sets out proposals to replace “state welfare” with an insurance system “operated by financial institutions within the private sector”.
Mo Stewart has spent eight years researching the toxic and all-pervasive influence of the US insurance giant Unum over successive UK governments, and how it led to the introduction of the “totally bogus” and non-medical work capability assessment (WCA), which she says was designed to make it very much more difficult for sick and disabled people to claim out-of-work disability and sickness benefits.
Stewart’s excellent book, Cash Not Care: The Planned Demolition Of The UK Welfare State, was published in September. She states that the assessment was modeled on methods used by the controversial company Unum to deny protection to sick and disabled people in the US who had taken out income protection policies.
She goes on to say that the WCA was “designed to remove as many as possible from access to [employment and support allowance] on route to the demolition of the welfare state”, with out-of-work disability benefits to be replaced by insurance policies provided by private companies like Unum.
Stewart warns us that the UK is now close to adopting a US-style model.
She’s absolutely right.
Our public services are being privately auctioned. The multinational corporations are queuing up for the sale of the century in the UK.
The public are picking up the tab.
Rest in link
Rogue company Unum’s profiteering hand in the government’s work, health and disability green paper
politicsandinsights.org/2016/11/29/rogue-company-unum-had-a-profiteering-hand-in-the-governments-work-health-and-disability-green-paper/
I wrote an extensive critique of the recent government green paper on work, health and disability. I mentioned that a government advisor, who is a specialist in labour economics and econometrics, has proposed scrapping all Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) sickness and disability benefits.
Matthew Oakley, a senior researcher at the Social Market Foundation, recently published a report entitled Closing the gap: creating a framework for tackling the disability employment gap in the UK, in which he proposes abolishing the ESA Support Group.
I also said: “Oakely also suggests considering a “role that a form of privately run social insurance could play in both increasing benefit generosity and improving the support that individuals get to manage their conditions and move back to work.”
And: “I’m sure the private company Unum (formerly UnumProvident) would jump at the opportunity. Steeped in controversy, with a wake of scandals that entailed the notorious company systematically denying people their disabilty insurance, in 2004, Unum entered into a regulatory settlement agreement (RSA) with insurance regulators in over 40 US states.
The settlement related to Unum’s “mishandling” of disability claims and required the company “to make significant changes in corporate governance, implement revisions to claim procedures and provide for a full re-examination of both reassessed claims and disability insurance claim decisions.”
The company is the top disability insurer in both the United States and United Kingdom. In the US, it has been regarded as one of the two most unscrupulous insurance companies. The rogue company was also accused of cheating thousands of people out of welfare payments in the US. By coincidence, the company has been involved in the design of the UK government’s controversial 2012 Welfare Reform Bill, advising the government on how to cut spending, particularly on disability support. What could possibly go right?“
Of course the vulture capitalist company Unum continues to “mishandle” claims both in the US, in violation of the US Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and here in the UK, denying people incapacity benefit, under employer’s group income protection policy (GIP).
The Reform think tank has also recently proposed scrapping what is left of the disability social security system, in their report Working welfare: a radically new approach to sickness and disability benefits, and has called for the government to set a single rate for all out-of-work benefits and to reform the way sick and disabled people are assessed.
The members of the neoliberal think tank propose that the government should cut the weekly support paid to 1.3 million sick and disabled people in the ESA Support Group from £131 to £73. This is the same amount that people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance receive. However, those people placed in the Support Group after assessment have been deemed by the state as unlikely to be able to work again in the foreseeable future. It would therefore be very difficult to justify this proposed cut, given the additional needs that disabled people have, which is historically recognised, and empirically verified by research.
Yet the authors of the report doggedly insist that having a higher rate of weekly benefit for extremely sick and disabled people encourages them “to stay on sickness benefits rather than move into work.” However, people on sickness benefits don’t move into work because they are too sick to work. Their own doctors and the state (via the work capability assessment) have already established that. Forcing them to work is outrageously tyrannical.
The report recommended savings which result from removing the disability-related additions to the standard allowance should be reinvested in support services and extra costs benefits – Personal Independence Payment (PIP). However the government have ensured that eligibility for that support is rapidly contracting, with the ever-shrinking political and economic re-interpretation of medically defined sickness and disability categories and a significant reduction in what the government deem to be a legitimate exemption from being “incentivised” into work.
Policy change can often be explained by reference to changes in background ideas about the state, society and the individual, held and promoted by influential individuals, groups, political parties and … multinational companies.
It turns out that you can predict such a lot by simply watching the way the wind blows.
The crib sheet
Theresa May’s new director of policy, John Godfrey, is a keen advocate of what, in his last job, at financial services giant Legal and General, he called “Beveridge 2.0”: using technology to introduce new forms of “social insurance”.
Godfrey told a campaigning group, the Financial Inclusion Commission last year that the systems used to deliver “auto-enrolment”, the scheme that ensures all low-income workers have a pension, could also be used to help the public insure themselves against “unexpected events”.
“There is a clear lesson from auto-enrolment that if you have a plumbing network or an infrastructure that works, that auto-enrolment infrastructure could be used for other things which would encourage financial inclusion: things like, for example, life cover, income protection and effective and very genuine personal contributory benefits for things like unemployment and sickness,” he said.
“They can be delivered at good value if there is mass participation through either soft compulsion or good behavioural economics.”
Note the context shift in the use of the term “inclusion”, which was originally deemed a democratic right, now it’s being discussed narrowly in terms of soft compulsion and individual responsibility. And an exchange of money. Subtext: inclusion is only for those who can pay for it.
A report published by the Adam Smith Institute as far back as 1995 – The Fortune Account – also sets out proposals to replace “state welfare” with an insurance system “operated by financial institutions within the private sector”.
Mo Stewart has spent eight years researching the toxic and all-pervasive influence of the US insurance giant Unum over successive UK governments, and how it led to the introduction of the “totally bogus” and non-medical work capability assessment (WCA), which she says was designed to make it very much more difficult for sick and disabled people to claim out-of-work disability and sickness benefits.
Stewart’s excellent book, Cash Not Care: The Planned Demolition Of The UK Welfare State, was published in September. She states that the assessment was modeled on methods used by the controversial company Unum to deny protection to sick and disabled people in the US who had taken out income protection policies.
She goes on to say that the WCA was “designed to remove as many as possible from access to [employment and support allowance] on route to the demolition of the welfare state”, with out-of-work disability benefits to be replaced by insurance policies provided by private companies like Unum.
Stewart warns us that the UK is now close to adopting a US-style model.
She’s absolutely right.
Our public services are being privately auctioned. The multinational corporations are queuing up for the sale of the century in the UK.
The public are picking up the tab.
Rest in link