People with disabilities incur additional costs that people without disabilities do not. This is to say that given the same income, people with disabilities, compared to those without, have a lower standard of living. Such additional costs come in two types: general additional costs and special additional costs. General additional costs involve items which, while required by people with and without disabilities alike, lead to higher expenditures for those with disabilities. Special additional costs refer to expenses incurred by people with disabilities only. These include costs having to do with special education, care and assistance, and institution-based rehabilitative services. People with disabilities would have incurred little if any additional cost, had there been in place a complete set of social protection programs designed for them. To be sure, a wide range of benefit schemes—health insurance medical aid benefits, care and assistance subsidies and other various support programs—have been created or expanded in Korea to cover cost needs that are specific to disabled individuals. But the additional costs of disability still remain a strain on people with disabilities. The need for improvements on financial support for people with disabilities There are three cash benefit programs—Disability Pension, Disability Allowance, and Child Disability Allowance—intended to help people with disabilities cover their additional costs. However, all these programs as they stand do not fully cover actual additional expenses on disability. Nor do they take into account in any meaningful way the differences in additional costs existing across different types of disability. The 5th Comprehensive Plan on People with Disabilities (2018~2022) has suggested some ways to address such problems. This study, using data from the 2017 Survey of the Living Conditions of People with Disabilities, identifies additional disability costs and the extent to which public programs cover them, and explores factors that should be taken into account in improving financial support for people with disabilities.
