Blind have to fork out extra $61m a year

RNZFB Chairman Don McKenzie

Being blind costs the country's 11,500 blind, deafblind and vision-impaired people and their families $61m a year, research has found.

A range of aspects of daily life, including shopping, travel and doing domestic tasks were all found to cost more for blind people.

The costs come from additional expenses faced by blind people, according to the survey commissioned by the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind.

The financial burden varies from person to person depending on factors including the timing of the onset of blindness, the amount of support available and the age of the person.

Shopping was more expensive because of a greater reliance on others to go to shops, additional time taken, lost savings due to difficulty of getting out and capitalising on sales.

There was also a further cost to the country of another $28m, including approximately $19m in benefits and compensation but excluding ACC.

Paula Daye, RNZFB chief executive, said: "Everyone involved in the blindness community knows that being blind or vision-impaired is expensive for individuals, families and society – in actual costs, time costs and opportunity costs.

"But determining the cost of blindness is like asking how long a piece of string is. No-one anywhere in the world has come up with the perfect, undisputed research on the cost of blindness. It's just too complex.

"This research cannot be used to derive a meaningful average cost per individual RNZFB member - the variations are too great for this type of averaging to have any meaning."

But she said it was the best research on the costs of blindness ever done in New Zealand and should therefore prove useful for the Foundation and Government.

This Cost of Blindness research, conducted by Gravitas Research and Strategy Ltd and Market Economics Ltd, found the main additional costs were in the following areas:
* Carrying out domestic tasks - $24m
* Day to day travel, not including work travel - $14m
* Shopping $5m
* Recreation - $5m
* Specialised equipment - $3m
* Medical - $2m

Further research by Dr Jonathan Godfrey and Deborah Brunning at Massey University suggests the costs to blind people could be even higher.

The completion of the project comes as the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) is planning to create a "single core benefit" that could affect the Blindness Benefit provided to approximately 1320 RNZFB members in 2002.

The RNZFB has argued that the Government should continue to provide a Blindness Benefit to blind people in employment.

RNZFB Chairman Don McKenzie, who is blind and whose wife is vision-impaired, said: "If you are blind and employed, your costs go up, not down because of adaptive technology equipment, transportation, and the like.

"If the goal is to get more blind and vision-impaired people into employment, the Blindness Benefit must remain as it is. You don't want to penalise blind people for succeeding."

The RNZFB and the Association of Blind Citizens of New Zealand Inc will be presenting the Cost of Blindness research to a wide range of Ministers, MPs and Ministry officials.

- HERALD ONLINE STAFF