Just days ago came another headline: thirty arrests in Naples for fraudulent disability pensions. It's not an isolated case. The papers are full of staggering numbers: roughly 30 percent of disability pension recipients have no right to them.
The Italian social security system revoked 18,840 pensions last year. Those figures are inflated, perhaps poorly verified — but they contain a kernel of hard truth.
So we must conclude that every year, countless Italian citizens pose as blind, or claim grave respiratory disease, or severe psychiatric illness, and steal from the state and from every taxpayer. They live off — or round out their income with — pensions meant to sustain them as imaginary invalids. Who are these people? Some are hustlers and drifters, professional con artists and marginalized people, perhaps exploited themselves.
But the real question is different. How does this happen at all? Disability allowances and invalidity pensions are awarded by teams of doctors and administrators. They conduct careful examinations, review extensive medical records, hold meetings to cross-check data. Are all these people blind? Incompetent? Ignorant of medicine? Or is it simply that here too, the old rule applies: scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, turn a blind eye to someone you can't say no to?
Second question: who pays the real price? That's easy to see. To protect itself from fraud and stolen funds, the public administration tightens its controls. People who genuinely suffer severe disabilities find themselves under ever harsher scrutiny. They face repeated clinical exams, humiliating investigations that waste their time and exhaust their families and caregivers.
Meanwhile, in the grip of financial crisis, public assistance budgets are slashed even as more people struggle financially. Welfare services shrink. Those truly afflicted by psychiatric and physical hardship find their pensions cut year after year. New, stricter rules leave them with reduced stipends, halved allowances, vanished school support.
Times are hard, and we Italians have never been known for strict civic duty or faithful observance of law. Yet we are also the country of Don Orione and his institutions, of Don Milani and his school, of Basaglia and the opening of the asylums. We are the country where, just these days, a film shot in prison with inmates serving long sentences won an international prize.
Is it possible that in such a nation, we cannot stamp out this shame — this crime — of stealing pensions from those least able to defend themselves?
Pennablù, 2012