Disability Bitch, satirical columnist for BBC Ouch!, responds to suggestions that people with disabilities are a financial drain on society. Triggering her ire: A recent report by the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB) that blindness costs the UK £6.5 billion a year. An excerpt:

Given that shocking revelation, it seems only natural to announce that I HATE BLIND PEOPLE and I’d like to ask that you all please give up sight loss and acquire a cheaper impairment, if you will. There’s a recession on, in case you didn’t realise. And you know who is footing the cost of your extravagantly expensive disabling condition? It’s me, the taxpayer, that’s who. Give it back.

… I’ve compiled my own study on this issue. I was trying to work out the cheapest way to be crippled. That way, we can all take it into account in our next lives, and maybe find our way toward being economy class handicappers, rather than selfishly hogging all the money with our complex impairment needs.

Somewhat startlingly, my research has also led me to conclude that every single human being on this planet is a drain on resources of one form or another and that we’d all be cheaper dead. Yes, the Normals too. I hope you can see how selfish the very act of being alive is. There’s a lesson there for all of us.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 6:51 am and is filed under blindness/visual impairments, budget, commentary, economics, humor, international. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.