A narrow outcome measure such as how much money is saved on disability payments has to be balanced against costs and benefits in other areas. Simply isolating that one figure and optimizing it might cost society and government MORE not LESS in the big picture. Is this being tracked?
But governments and even many for-profit corporations often do focus on the "little picture" even when it's obvious the big picture will suffer. To a large extent, I think it's due to the way these organizations operate - bonuses/appointments/re-elections/etc are structured to reward specific short term goals without accounting for damage done to the wider or longer-term implications.
It's wrong and it's stupid, but as long as the system is set up in such a manner, it doesn't seem particularly fixable, especially since it's the people in charge and benefiting from the stupid policies that have the most power to change those policies.
Are medical costs being taken into account? A broke disabled person might not even be able to get to a doctor or hospital, or be otherwise unable to look after themselves adequately. Hence they might have more medical issues. On the one hand they might die, oh look, thats a big saving to government. On the other hand their health issues might worsen and take up more and more medical resources in an already overstretched system. Is that a saving?
If Simon Wessely had his way, people who have CFS or "Medically Unexplained Symptoms" of any sort and do not comply with CBT, etc to fix them, should not be allowed anything except infrequent routine doctor visits:
In patients with a long history of severely impaired functioning, or who have proven consistently resistant to treatment, management is essentially supportive with infrequent but regular contact. The aim with this approach is to at least reduce further deterioration and limit unnecessary or repeated investigations and treatments.
Reid S, Wessely S. Chronic fatigue syndrome. Conn’s Current Therapy (ed Rakel, Bope). Saunders, 2002, 110-113
The expert consensus is that, once an organic cause for symptoms has been excluded, further examination and investigation should only be initiated if a new symptom develops.
Page L, Wessely S. Medically unexplained symptoms: exacerbating factors in the doctor-patient encounter. J Royal Soc Medicine 2003: 96: 223-227
So in the case of ME/CFS, "resistant" patients would be put into a corner and ignored, along with FM, IBS, repetitive strain injury, post-viral fatigue syndrome, tension headache, tempomandibular joint dysfunction, atypical facial pain, globus syndrome, non-cardiac chest pain, chronic pain, PMS, chronic pelvic pain, hyperventilation syndrome, and multiple chemical sensitivity.
That could save quite a bit of money, especially when doctors are encouraged to avoid "excessive" investigations when diagnosing these conditions.
If you think about it, it's quite brilliant - attribute disease to patient beliefs, devise a treatment that isn't a cure, blame patient beliefs if the treatment doesn't work, withhold medical treatment, withhold permanent disability status, and generally obstruct biological research into these illnesses. And then you can extend these methods to use on "medically unexplained" aspects of known biological diseases which are currently incurable and have some of the same symptoms, and seriously consider the same withholding of doctor access and disability status - after all who knows how functional they'd be able to be if they'd just try harder!
Oh yeah. It's also evil.
BPS is looking more and more like a means to shaft the public when it comes to health care.