Disability and benefits

Reading about health issues or listening to people wax on about them bores me witless. The Dominion Post has a resident health columnist by the name of Chris Kalderimis. He knows how boring health is so he gets people's attention by rather cynically using photos of dead guys - recently dead - to discuss what killed them. Last week it was Paul Newman, to discuss lung cancer and smoking (even though we don't know whether Paul Newman smoked) and today it is Rob Guest and stroke. Casting a reluctant eye over the text (only slightly less reluctant than the one I cast over political news) I noticed this statement;

"In New Zealand stroke is the leading cause of disability..."

Being reasonably familiar with the leading reasons why people rely on disability benefits this rather floored me.

More recent figures are most certainly available but the following are those I can quickly lay my hands on.

At July 2004 1,435 people were receiving a sickness or invalid's benefit due to having suffered a stroke. That's 1.2 percent of all the people on those benefits.

Either there is a massive number of people who have suffered strokes who are not relying on welfare or there are thousands of people who are on benefits who do not suffer from what this doctor would class as genuine disabilities.

It's not a politically easy business questioning the number of people who rely full time on a sickness or invalid's benefit but given there are now over 130,000 whereas in the 1940s (post-war),1950s,1960s and 1970s there were never more than 20,000 some serious attention is overdue.