Atos Healthcare: Still profiting from misery
Whilst the Olympic opening ceremony, quite fairly, glorified our National Health Service, it is nonetheless worth remembering the real state of affairs for a significant number of Britain's sick. In April of this year, around 3400 people in Oxford and 10,000 in the county of Oxfordshire were subsisting on Incapacity Benefit (the allowance for those physically unable to work, which ranges within the modest bounds of £88-£105 weekly. Of that number, roughly two in three were told they were fit to engage in some sort of work. Employment Minister Chris Grayling would hail the figures, calling the current system 'a waste of human life'- supremely ironic given that an average of thirty-two people nationally died every week after failing the new incapacity benefit tests in 2011. Between January and August 2011, 1,100 claimants in the 'work-related activity group' alone died. Clearly, mistakes are being made (and have been made since New Labour let the likes of assessors Atos Healthcare loose on the disabled communit