The ADNCentral.org Blog

As a parent of a disabled child with Cerebral Palsy I would like to raise some doubt about the real benefits of a No Fault Disability Insurance scheme.

It is so naïve to believe that such a ‘no fault compensation’ scheme will provide greater funding for disabled people and the NGO’s. The overall amount of funding is mainly a function of the economic situation (‘how much can the government afford’) and the lobbying efforts of the disability related community.

If a ‘no fault compensation’, is automatically linked to removal of litigation against negligent doctors (remember that this is the only real reason for the push for this scheme), then the direct outcome will be even greater impunity among the doctors, hence more cases of negligence and disability. So the same funding ‘cake’ will need to be shared among more victims.

What the ‘bean counters’ forget that the ‘problem’ is not cost of litigation, but the cost to the public and individual families of every case of disability. This applies especially to ‘avoidable’ disability due to medical negligence. A person that could have been an able-bodied ‘tax payer’ has become a ‘tax burden’. I am not suggesting that we should spend less on the disabled, to the contrary. But certainly we should try to reduce the number of avoidable disability incidents.

New Zealand had the ‘no fault compensation’ scheme for a while, it is interesting to see what the trend in number of CP cases in that country. According to http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/mor_inf_cer_pal_percap-infantile-cerebral-palsy-per-capita , New Zealand current ranking in per capita mortality attributed to infantile Cerebral Palsy is no. 17 in the world with 4.95663 deaths per 1 million (Australia is ranked no. 24 with 3.98208 deaths per 1 million people), so it does not appear that having a ‘no fault’ scheme has improved the level of medical care in New Zealand, where the incidence of mortality due to CP is about 24% higher than in Australia.

It is in the public interest to reduce and eliminate malpractice. This is not just on financial grounds, but at the core of our right for safety and fair go.

There is an argument of ‘equality’ associated with a ‘no fault compensation’ scheme, where all disabled persons are provided in the same manner, regardless of the circumstances that caused their disability. While this sounds ‘nice’, in other accidents and mishaps, some people have insurance and some don’t, some people have recourse to litigation and some have undesirable situations that cannot be litigated. It is unfair and against the accepted basic human rights to deny access to justice when a person was harmed and is entitled to that recourse. Realistically, this ‘equality’ simply reduces the amount of funding available to disabled people whose disability is not due to negligence.

Note that level of promised support is missing from the statements supporting the ‘no fault disability insurance’ does it specify the. We already have a disability pension scheme, so unless the level of support is significantly higher, having this scheme will have no real benefit to the disabled or their carers. Is it possible to prescribe a uniform compensation when the support needs vary significantly over a wide range of disability severity spectrum? In order to be effective such a scheme has to include the flexibility and logic to match the support to the need – there is no hint of that in the proposals.

This scheme should not be linked at all to removal of litigation against negligent parties that have caused the disability. Such a link is contrary to basic natural justice. As shown in the New Zealand case it would remove the only deterrent to negligence and therefore increase the occurrences of disability cases due to malpractice. It would also reduce the pool of available monetary resources for the individual disabled persons, as even those who are currently entitled to malpractice compensation would join the public scheme.

No insurance scheme can be a ’solution’ to a problem. No sane person suggests that the only necessary protection against fire is to buy insurance, the same applies to disability. Our priority first as a society has to be a more reliable health care systems, to eliminate all cases of unnecessary disability. The second priority is to provide the best care and support to our disabled citizens to ensure their dignity and equality in society and the best possible chance to maximize their participation and contribution to society and their own personal achievement.

As it stands, it looks like a recipe for an ‘official’ poverty and misery for the disabled while ensuring that the who perpetrators are off the hook. It will increase the ranks of the disabled and further erode the public coffers, with no real benefit. It is merely a ‘code’ for endorsement of malpractice that the public at large and the disabled will pay for dearly on the long term.