It’s becoming exactly the same story in the UK under the conservative government, people with lifelong disabilities forced to be assessed regularly to prove their legs or arms haven’t grown back or they haven’t grown out of their cerebral palsy etc.
According to the UK government’s own figures benefit fraud makes up 3.9% of the total amount paid out (N.B. this includes all types of benefits), and 75% of people rejected for disability benefits are successful on appeal. It seems pretty obvious that this is an ideological policy of penalising people who can’t work because people’s value as human beings is seen as equivalent to the amount of work they can do.
One solution to this is to have fixed size budgets for assistance programs. Eg. Each week 1% of GDP will be spent on XYZ assistance program.
The funding available will be divided equally by all eligible people.
Then fraud becomes not the taxpayers problem, but the problem of other eligible people. Those people will get more if they can reduce the fraud rate.
Obviously for this to happen, the eligible people need to be empowered to do something about it - and a good way to achieve that is to give the money to a charity for the blind to distribute to the blind, rather than directly to the government's list of blind people. Obviously you need to make sure the charity has suitable governance, but there are already regulations to ensure that.
According to the UK government’s own figures benefit fraud makes up 3.9% of the total amount paid out (N.B. this includes all types of benefits), and 75% of people rejected for disability benefits are successful on appeal. It seems pretty obvious that this is an ideological policy of penalising people who can’t work because people’s value as human beings is seen as equivalent to the amount of work they can do.