The British Medical Journal has a piece from a GP, Dr Anne Dyson, who writes that it is too difficult for ill people to claim benefits (£):

I have worked in the NHS as a principal and partner in general practice providing primary care for patients since 1986. I have met patients who have told me of the difficulties they’d had claiming sickness benefits, but I had previously had no personal experience of the system. . .

I was shocked by the bureaucracy of a system that is supposed to be a safety net for people who fall sick through no fault of their own and have paid national insurance contributions all their lives. Fortunately, I am not reliant on receiving any state benefits for my living expenses because I have sufficient private provision, but I am sure that many of my patients are not in such a lucky position. Furthermore, I do not feel ill or unwell as such, otherwise I might not have had the strength and perseverance to persist with my claim. And nor do I have hearing loss or a speech impairment, which would make a telephone interview impossible. I am also organised enough to know where to find my birth and marriage certificates and so on.

It is a scandal that the system is so complicated: it is likely to fail the very people who are most in need of help. I suspect this may be a deliberate government ploy to reduce the number of benefit claims and reduce the overall cost of welfare. If so this should be publicised and shown for what it is: the government withholding funds from sick and needy people through a bureaucratic claim system.

It's a view which is rarely allowed into the media, yet this is the natural end point of arguments that we should be more aggressive in withdrawing sickness benefits from people who "don't need them". In order to do that, you have to subject thousands of people who do need them to batteries of tests designed to prove that they aren't fraudulently claiming. And all of this in a system which suffers very low levels of fraud. The DWP estimated that the disability living allowance – no longer granted, due to reforms by the department – had a fraud rate of just 0.5 per cent.