Question: Is what is considered a disability been relaxed? I mean I see a lot of people that can walk who park in handicapped parking spots. What's up with that?
America has been going crazy. That explains why so many people who look like they can function really can't. Post-traumatic stress disorder may explain all those folks who've come back from Afghanistan and Iraq, plus some occasional mass murderers like The Joker Holmes, but bipolars, schizos, and paranoids ought to get counted in, too.
If I lived in your country and had to choose between your candidates, maybe I'd go crazy, too.
I know two people on disability - my father, who has Post-Polio Syndrome, which causes him constant pain, fatigue, weakness, muscular degeneration (his thighs are as thin as my my forearms), and also reduced cognitive function due to an inability to sleep through the night and dealing with the constant pain, and my wife's aunt, who has leukemia and drop foot due to a botched hip replacement.
Both of them would have preferred to work - my father kept getting fired or laid off from various jobs because he couldn't stay awake during the day due to the fatigue symptoms, and even after he lost his last job he took a stab at self-employment for a few years (going deeply in debt in the process) rather than apply for disability. When he became physically unable to do that job as well, he finally applied for disability, and then had to go through two years of rejections and a court appearance before he finally got approved (at that time, post-polio syndrome was a very new diagnosis, if he was going through the process now I think he would have less trouble).
My wife's aunt, on the other hand, could still work, but her last job was for a call center. They give employees exactly four minutes for a bathroom break, and if you go over that you get a strike against you. Do that three times and they fire you. Between the leukemia, which reduced her endurance, and the drop foot, there was no way she could get from her desk to the bathroom (on the other side of the call center) in four minutes. She had asked to have her desk moved closer to the bathroom, and they refused - she was one of their longest tenured employees and was making almost double what a new hire would, and it was pretty clear they were just looking for an excuse to fire her with cause. So, it was either apply for disability or go back to work and be fired and then have to apply for disability (who would hire someone in their early 60s with obvious health problems?) - writing was on the wall.
I'm sure that there are people out there who are gaming the system to some extent, but based on my experience the problem is that employers aren't as willing to accommodate employees with disabilities as they might been have in the past, and also simply that there were probably a whole lot of people out there who should have been on disability, but instead bounced from job to job, barely scraping by, going into debt, and living miserable existences who now at least have some kind of safety net that can keep them off the streets (which is where my parents probably would have been if my grandparents hadn't been there to bail them out a few times). Disability isn't a road to riches, either, unless you worked for a fair number of years at a high salary - my father collects about $800 a month, less than $10k a year. If my mother wasn't there working a full time job, I'm not sure how he would have enough money to support himself. If there are people who are cheating the system, by all means, expose them - but I think it's very unlikely that the majority of people on disability are cheaters, and I think that if you want to severely restrict eligibility for disability, you'd better have some kind of plan to help the people you're kicking off the rolls that's a little more fleshed out than "sucks for them, lazy leeches".
Allons-y!
