It gets better!!
http://ht.ly/7z0MLToday a tory contemptible announced the next phase in this disgusting campaign to remove the sick and disabled from the ranks of the "deserving". Now, instead of getting your assessment after 3 months, you will get it in 4 weeks: apparently four weeks counts as "long term" and it leads to wasted lives. People who claim sickness benefit drift into long term unemployability almost instantly, it seems. They break a toe and instantly conclude they will never work again. They sink into despair and only ATOS can save them. So now one's GP won't be able to sign a sick line for more than 4 weeks; after all, what do doctors know compared to private sector assessors of the quality we now have at our disposal?
There is another interesting feature of this clown's world view as well: you will not be able to claim a sickness benefit if you are sick: at least not for three months. Instead you will claim a job seeker's allowance which is paid at a lower level, and is not actually payable unless you are available for work: which being sick, you won't be. But be assured, this is not an attempt to reduce the benefit bill: perish the thought. Instead it is to help people like me from sinking into apathy and depression. I have news for this freaking genius: his existence on the planet makes me despair: he is a direct cause of the very condition he is seeking to prevent.
Guy makes flat assertions with no basis in reality but reassuringly he still finds ways to give his rich pals some money: employers will get tax breaks for employing people with health problems, he says.
He does point out that occupational health assessment is not a GP's job: how true. But it is not an ATOS assessor's job either, as amply demonstrated by my own experience outlined upthread. Is a doctor without the committment to practice medicine after undertaking extensive training provided by the rest of us a better bet (in terms of the qualities we want in a GP) than, say, a GP? Or is she a selfish cow, who prefers form filling on behalf of a bunch of plutocrats who are intent on pushing the costs of care onto the very poorest, without any sense of "the big society" we hear about in another part of the forest? Who exactly is it who thinks society owes them a living, again?
Maybe it is Carol Black and David Frost, who are heading this initiative: she is a doctor and he is a former head of the CBI: great combination. She has been prominent in all these initiatives for ages: he is quoted as saying
QUOTE
Frost said when people were off sick for longer than four weeks they started "to lose the will to work".
They are both crowing about "evidence based medicine" so I would just love to see the evidence for that little gem. But of course, I won't . He made it up out of his own head, and still had wood left over.
It is interesting that the tory who is pushing this rubbish is one Lord Freud: the apple does not fall far from the tree: presumably he thinks that bubonic plague is psychosomatic ....
