The report found that 68,000 pensioners and 25,000 working-age people died whilst living in poverty in the last year of their lives. They died from multiple issues but the report argues that the poverty that they suffered made their situation much worse.
The report concluded that “This report shows that the UK is also facing a ‘cost-of-dying crisis’, with many more people affected by terminal illness at risk of falling into poverty as a result of lost income, higher prices and a working-age benefits system that is increasingly failing to safeguard people from poverty at the end of life.”
The government has made some small changes to how benefits can be collected when someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness, but the fact that people who worked their whole lives (pensioners) or were of working age fell into abject poverty so quickly after becoming sick shows how fragile our society is.
Many people are living on the edge in terms of finance. Yet the right-wing media spews out hatred every day blaming the poor for their situation in an attempt to deflect away from government policies that inflict poverty on people and also the staggering wealth of the rich in the UK.
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