Compensation for Disability

Abstract

ABSTRACTDifficulties encountered in the transfer of money to a minority group in society are explored. Should benefits for disabled people seek to mitigate earnings loss, functional incapacity or damage? Should they take the form of contingency benefits, merited payment, or compensatory and reparatory ‘gifts’? What are the reasons for the different approaches adopted in the War Pensions, Industrial Injuries, and Invalidity Benefit schemes?An historical account of the development of these schemes shows that payments related to attributed characteristics or ‘condition’ avoid the pitfalls of undue stress on status, performance and achievement inherent in alternative, and apparently more integrative, benefits. Payments related to condition accentuate ‘difference’ but if they represent a collective liability for society's vicariously caused diswelfares, they need not be experienced as stigmatizing. It may therefore be possible to conceive of a compensatory / reparatory payment for all disabled people, as of right, independent of insurance status, average life earnings, current wage, and other measured achievements. To avoid ‘physiological and psychological means testing’ the basic payment would be assessed on a disabled person's assumed ‘loss of faculty’ but, in the interest of equity, individual measurements of functional limitation may be necessary for additional cash benefits and services.