Regular guest writer, James Glover, returns to the Mule today to look at the figures behind the proposed NDIS.

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is in the news again. A welcome development for people with disability and their carers and families…and friends and pretty much anyone else who cares about their fellow humans. It is not a platitude to say that disability can strike anyone at any time in their life and the stories of these people are truly moving and shaming, especially as we live in one of the richest countries in the world. Adults who are only provided with two assisted showers a week and parents providing 24/7 care to profoundly disabled children but who cannot afford a new specialised wheelchair because there is limited funding for such things (wheelchairs cost from $500 for the basic models, of which I have two, and range up to $20,000 or more). In August 2011 The Productivity Commission reported on and recommended the NDIS and since then pretty much everyone agrees it is a good idea if we could only agree how to fund it.

So what does it replace? Currently most people with serious disabilities that prevent them from, inter alia, working, can receive the disability support pension (DSP). A small number will have insurance payouts if they were “lucky” enough to to have someone else to blame for their disability. In addition, anyone can receive a rebate on medications in excess of about $1,200 a year and, of course, access to (not quite free) public health care. On top of that, there are concession cards for public transport and a taxi card system which provides half-price taxi fares to partially make up for many disabled peoples inability to use public transport. The DSP does not depend on a specific disability and for a single adult over 21 with no children it is about $19,000 a year. For child under 18 who is living at home it is about $9,000 a year. While this would appear enough to live on (forgetting overseas holidays or a mortgage) most such people rely on additional support services for everything from basic medical equipment to respite for carers. There are currently 820,000 people, about 4% of the population, on the DSP. The Productivity Commission estimates 440,000 people on the NDIS so most of these will not be eligible for the NDIS but may still receive the DSP. People 65 and over of pensionable age are not eligible for the DSP and will not be eligible for the NDIS.

The purpose of the NDIS is to provide funding for care in line with the specific requirements of the recipients, and will mean additional support to the DSP for some. You can read more about it at ndis.gov.au. Unlike the DSP, it isn’t a fortnightly stipend or, like standard disability or employment insurance, a lump sum. The government is planning to roll out pilot programs in many regions in the next few years, aiming for a complete national program by 2018-19. I won’t go into the politics but it seems even politicians can feel shame and  bipartisan support for the NDIS is emerging with a good chance of a bill through this parliament in the next few weeks. The total cost of the NDIS is often quoted as $18bn a year. Some funding is proposed from an additional 0.5% to the Medicare levy. Other funding wil come jointly from the federal government and the states. The proposed levy will raise about $3.8bn a year, so nowhere near enough for the full cost. If you subsume the half the DSP cost of $11bn a year that (only) leaves an outstanding amount of $8-10bn a year to be funded even with the Medicare Levy. Hopefully with bipartisan support the full NDIS will be implemented sooner rather than later.

So that’s the background on the NDIS. The real purpose of this article though is to consider the question “How many disabled people are there in Australia anyway?”.

Well that’s easy, just read any article on disability–for instance this one by disability advocate and media personality Stella Young–and you’ll be told the answer: 20%. 20%. 20%! I am a huge admirer of Stella Young’s work, so don’t get me wrong if I choose to disagree with her on this. The 20% figure gets quoted so frequently it must be true. Well maybe. People questioning this figure are directed to the 2009 ABS Census report on disability where the self-reported disability figure is 18.1% (+/-1.3%). So a round 20% is not too bad, right? Well like all statistics, the details are important. Firstly this includes people of all ages and, not surprisingly, many more older people have disabilites. From 40% at 65-69 to 88% at 90+. For those under 65 the figure is 13.2%. It increases with age and, in the 45-54 age group, is about the average 18%. Anyway why does it matter if the true figure is overstated? Well one reason is that while there is widespread support for the NDIS, the one concern that keeps coming up is who is eligible.

According to the Productivity Commission report they estimate 440,000 people on the NDIS of whom 330,000 would be disabled, and the rest made up of carers and people on preventative programs.

This report has a deeper analysis, which takes the figures at face value. It also includes breakdowns by disabling condition. I have paraphrased these in the following table based on some of the major causes of disability. And look, there are those perennial favourites of those who think all disabled people are really bludgers: back problems,stress and depression, making up about 18% of the total. Not quite bankrupting the country then.

But what constitutes disability? It is basically a lack of normal activity rather than a set of diseases per se. The ABS report has 5 activity based categories, four of which are based on “restrictions on core activities: communication, mobility, self care”. There are “profound”, “severe”, “moderate” and “mild” levels of disability. A fifth category is  “schooling or employment restriction”, but overlaps with the first four. Here is a table with the breakdown by category and age group. Combining those with a core activity limitation with employment/school limitations the figure is 15.3%. The difference between this and the higher self-reported 18% figure I suspect comes from peope who feel a bit crap a lot of the time, but aren’t signficiantly prevented from their activities. So I would estimate the number of disabled people to be more like 15% than 20%. For those under 65 this is 11%. The NDIS has a similar definition but includes social activities as well, but don’t yet provide any breakdowns.

So much for the figures from the ABS, which I think we can all agree are definitive, right?  Looking at the ABS figures for this group (under 65) they total 345,000. But wait! The figure of 15.3% is based on a total number of respondents to the census of only 9.5 million people. If the reportage rate was the same as the general population of 22m then there would be about 700,000 severe or profoundly disabled people. But the Productivity Commission only estimates 330,000 or half this number on the NDIS! The alternative to the unlikely event that less than 50% of profoundly or severely disabled people will end up on the NDIS is that the reported ABS figure for people in this category is correct but the rate is wrong. While the overall reportage rate is about 50% it looks like the reportage rate for disabled people in the severe and profound category is closer to 100%. If this was also true for the other categories of disabled people then that suggests that the real rate of disability is less than 9% and maybe as low as 7%. Assuming the reportage rate is the same as the rest of the population, ie 50%, for the other categories then the disability rate might be as high as 13%. So lets split it and say 10%. In any event the widely reported figure of 20% is well above the highest estimates based on the ABS and Productivity Commission data. The real rate of disability is closer to 10% than 20%.

Does it matter? Maybe. If you claim that 20% of the population are disabled, people start quickly calculating that the cost is unsupportable if all of those people are on the NDIS! Which of course they won’t be. Fewer than half of disabled people are already on the DSP. Less than half of those will transfer to the NDIS. Overstating the percentage of disabled people isn’t necessarily a good argument for the NDIS if it reduces support from otherwise sympathetic people.

A final thought: in the large Australian organisation I work for, there are a fair few disabled people, some of whom I think would be categorised as severe. With proper support many disabled people can gain suitable education or training and hence employment and support themselves and contribute to the economic activity of the nation. The more people with disability who are employed the fewer on the DSP or NDIS, the more money for those who really have no choice. Supporting people with disability into employment is as important, in my opinion, as supporting them in living and care through the NDIS.

[This article was rewritten following some comments and some further research. In line with all my articles on Stubbornmule this article is about estimating rough numbers from scarce data “back of the beercoaster” style rather than disability politics, it just happens I have a personal interest in this subject]