Norway - ME patients denied allowance for young disabled people

In Norway you usually get 66% of your previous salary in disability benefits if you get sick/injured and is no longer able to work.

But what if you got sick/injured before you started working? Then you get next to nothing and the system therefore has an extra allowance for young disabled people. However, it's getting harder and harder to qualify for this. Particularly for ME patients, it seems.

The newspaper Dagsavisen has an article about this problem today. They tell the story of 32 year old Martine who has been ill since she was a child. The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration demanded she went on a rehabilitation stay in 2019. This made her deteriorate and afterwards she had to move in with her parents together with her two children. She's only able to be in light activity for two hours a day. She was denied the allowance for young disabled people, despite fulfilling the requirements. One of the reasons was her rehabilitation stay, which the Labour and Welfare Administration themselves had demanded.

It seems it's now required that ME patients must be bed bound in order to quality for the allowance for young disabled people, even though the law states that it shall be given to those who got their ability to work reduced by at least 50% before they turned 26 years, due to severe and lasting illness or injury, which also must be clearly documented.

Lawyer Lene Hamre says it's absurd that in order to get the extra benefits for young disabled people, ME patients can almost not have any functionality left at all. She says it seems there are extra strict rules for people suffering from ME, and that she has several examples on this.

Bjørn Lien from the Labour and Welfare Administration denies that there are extra strict ruled for ME patients compared with other patient groups. He says it's not about the specific diagnosis, but how affected the person is by his/her injury/illness. He says it's not required that ME patients must be bed bound in order to qualify for these benefits, and that each case is assessed individually.

Martine (32) fikk avslag på ung ufør-tillegget, selv om hun oppfyller kravene
google translation: Martine (32) was denied the young disability allowance, even though she meets the requirements

 

Dagsavisen with a follow up article where ME patients' struggle with the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration is confirmed by Elisabeth Thoresen, spokeswoman and leader of the organisation AAP-aksjonen who is protesting against a tightening by the government of the process to achieve benefit payments due to injury/illness.

- This does not make any sense. I constantly see that people with other serious diagnoses get granted young disabilities, even if they work up to 50 percent. Only for ME do they require one to be completely bedridden. It is clear that ME is not exactly a high-status disease in the Labour and Welfare Administration, for this follows no logic, Thoresen point out, who has contact with many ME sufferers through the AAP-aksjonen.

Hva i all verden er det Nav driver med?
google translation: What on earth is the Labour and Welfare Administration doing?

Yesterday a private fundraising initiative was started, in order to make a juridical assessment to determine whether the Labour and Welfare Administration is in fact discriminating against young ME sufferers applying for the allowance for young disabled people. The goal is to raise 100 00 NOK (10 500 USD, 9 350 EUR, 8 400 USD) and 64 800 NOK have already been raised.

Støtt ME-sykes gjennomføring av juridisk rapport om ung ufør-diskrimineringen i forvaltningen
google translation not possible, it seems.

 

A new article from Dagsavisen. This time about the private fundraising to hire a law firm to make a judicial assessment of the National Insurance Court's ruling on ME patients and the allowance for young disabled people.

The fundraising is initiated by several young ME sufferers with Victor Håland, former law student, as front person.
He says to Dagsavisen:

- Since the National Insurance Court does not keep statistics and does not publish all rulings, I cannot say for sure about the number of rejections for ME sufferers versus other diagnoses. It was nevertheless shocking to see that the condition assessment was consistently a lot stricter in ME cases than in other diagnoses, including that of all activity - which has nothing to do with work ability - being used against the applicant. I did not find such a consistent practice in other diagnoses.

The law firm who will be hired to do the assessment is Advisio. Owner and lawyer Olav Lægreid says:

- We work from a the hypothesis, that it may turn out that ME is a diagnosis that scores very low on reversals in Social Security. If so, what are the characteristics of ME that make it more difficult to get young people with disabilities? It may be a misunderstood illness, and that many who work within the system have misconceptions about how severe the symptoms are for those affected. We hope to find this out, says the lawyer.

Victor har samlet inn over 70,000 kroner til å belyse diskriminering av ME-syke
google translation: Victor has raised mored than NOK 70,000 to highlight discrimination against ME sufferers

 

It's not much different in Germany. If you haven't insured yourself when you were healthy, any chronically ill or disabled person will be treated like people who were never willing to educate themselves or work. This means you first have to spend your savings, if you own property or a car that is too expensive, you will have to sell it. If you have a job, you are not allowed to earn more than 100 € I think. Only then, you will get the minimum support that everyone gets who hasn't worked before and is uninsured. It is ca. 430 € p.m. in addition to rent payment. If you're lucky and get assessed as disabled, you will get ca. 150 € on top if you can prove that your disease justifies it. But the assessment of a disease like CFS is quite difficult because there is little awareness, so there has to be some luck involved to get a medical assessor who understands CFS. If I don't find any effective treatment soon, I will have to go through this process.

 

I have been quite surprised recently to read of the extent to which the "Illness Behaviour" Model was specifically and explicitly framed to prevent adoption of "the sick role". The references in the literature by Wessely and Sharpe and others are just the "tip of the iceberg". Some of it is rather unpleasant. And this is from the US, not the UK.

 

I didn't realise how little people with disabilities get in Germany!

Australians on a disability pension get about 1250 € (at current exchange rates) per month. There is the possibility of rent assistance on top of that which is around 185 € per month. Rent in Australia is very expensive, starting at around 650-800 € for a 1 bedroom flat per month. But I heard it is similarly expensive in the big cities of Germany?

 

It isn't much different in German cities if you already have an older rental agreement. If you want a new one, however, it might well be over 1000 €. Consider this when looking at the charts, it's only that "low" because of existing rental agreements. But there are legal loopholes when it comes to tenant protection and many big players use this.

Similarish, yes. My main concern is the bureaucracy, the expropriation of your life work due to illness, neglect of children of affected people, and that most of what you could earn on top is reduced from the payments at a fixed limit, not relatively. Relatively, you would still have the perception that your work actually makes a difference. They don't seem to understand the importance of social integration, that most people are actually eager to work, and how these rules push people outside of society.