Mugged just for suffering the cruellest of diseases

Of all the diseases of old age, dementia is perhaps the cruellest. and for whatever reason — longevity, lifestyle, pollution, genes, we don’t really know — more and more people are facing the spectre of terminal cognitive decline.

In the UK, there are currently around 850,000 people suffering from dementia in one form or another. By 2025, they will number more than a million. One person develops the disease every three minutes. It’s heartbreaking.

But what’s even more distressing is the way those with dementia — and the relatives who inevitably care for them — are treated. Second-class citizens doesn’t quite cover it. Cattle class, more like.

This week the plight of sufferers was brought into sharp relief by research from the alzheimer’s Society, showing that individuals diagnosed with this illness face a ‘dementia premium’ on their care home costs. That means anything from £ 33,000 to £ 62,000 a year compared with £26,00 to £41,000 for standard care.

This alone would be bad enough. But if you consider the fact dementia patients are expected to pay for their own care — unlike, say, someone suffering from heart disease, diabetes or cancer — and the whole sorry situation adds up to a cruel kick in the dentures.

Especially when you also consider that even with the average house price in the UK being around £220,000, selling a treasured family home — one that you have laboured a lifetime for — isn’t going to buy more than a few years of respite.

AS

If suffering from one of the cruellest diseases known to mankind wasn’t bad enough; as if being robbed of your mind wasn’t humiliation enough, we’ll also make you sell your home to pay for it. and then charge you through the nose for the privilege.

Surely I cannot be alone in feeling furious at the injustice of it all. These are some of the most vulnerable people in our society. Yet they are effectively being mugged, on a daily basis and in plain sight — and no one seems to care.

Certainly not the self-appointed social justice campaigners of Twitter, or the virtue- signalling luvvies of stage and screen. Not the politicians, more interested in arguing over power than worrying about people who might not be around come the next election, or the BBC, too busy espousing more fashionable causes such as Black History Month or #metoo.

adding insult to injury is the fact that, unlike so many of those who place intolerable pressure on the system, dementia sufferers are, by the very nature of their advanced years, one of the few groups of people who have actually contributed to the NHS materially.

Through a lifetime of taxation and National Insurance contributions, they have paid their dues. Only to be told, in their time of need: sorry, there’s none left. and all because they happen to be suffering from the wrong disease.

What bitter irony for sufferers and their families to watch, powerless, as the Government extends costly treatment to the world and his wife (sometimes literally) while refusing to provide vital assistance to those who have supported it the most.

I’m not arguing that dementia patients should have special treatment. Merely that they should be treated like any other group of people suffering from a major lifechanging condition. On the NHS.

The very least they deserve is freedom from the stress of financial worry. To be allowed to spend what little quality of life they have left in the comfort of familiar surroundings, in their own homes, not in the hands of strangers in institutions who see them not as people — parents, partners, loved ones — but as cash cows.