On the 14th of June 2016, the Netherlands signed a United Nations(UN) convention meant to better the societal position of disabled people. “The norm will be that there will be no more barriers for disabled people.” Those were the words of former SGP-party leader and member of the Dutch parliament, Kees van der Staaij, when said parliament unanimously voted in favour of signing the convention.
This year it’s been ten years since my country signed the convention. This year it took me six months of waiting and bureaucracy to get a mobility aid. Six months of not being able to leave the house by myself. Six months of not being able to do the groceries for myself. Six months of my life being put completely on hold. All while the wheels of bureaucracy slowly, and unhurriedly ground away.
Patience…
When my physical health took a head dive about two years ago it was hard for me to accept. I was young, at 24 years, and not prepared to slow down any time soon. Though my body had been struggling for years, I’d been ignoring it whenever I could and impatiently waiting for it to restore back to ‘normal’. In the summer of 2025, I got a huge reality check when injuries and pain took their toll and became unable to leave the house by myself.
After months of denial I finally decided I deserved to get some of my freedom back so I contacted my municipality to get a mobility aid through the WMO (Wet Maatschappelijke Ondersteuning; Law of Societal Support) that was put in place to help people with impairments be able to partake in society with less obstacles. When I applied for WMO in November of 2025, I was told that the process would take approximately 8 weeks. I was grateful to get help, but still the idea of spending 8 weeks at home made me nervous. Little did I know I was in for an absolute treat, as the whole process before I would actually have my mobility aid would take a gruelling six months.
The initial delay happened because of the winter holidays. Because I applied for WMO in November my application was delayed by two weeks, meaning that I received the letter confirming my right to a mobility aid only in the first week of February 2026. The real problem started a week later when I contacted the housing corporation for the apartment complex I live in about needing a stationing and charging spot for my mobility scooter. Under Dutch law, housing corporations must dedicate some space for residents with mobility aids. The question of ‘where do we park it?’ took them two whole months to answer.
So now it’s April, and I haven’t been able to leave the house for nine months. The spot they end up assigning to me is in the parking garage, which prompts the following question ‘how do I get a key for the parking garage?’. It takes them another two months to figure out how to give me an access key to the garage, but they forget to mention that I need a remote to be able to open the garage door. By the end of May, I’ve spent the last four months calling several times a week to get this fixed, I haven’t left my house for almost eleven months and I am beyond desperate.
When I finally get the remote and I have my charging point installed and my mobility scooter delivered, the technician accidentally short circuited the outlet of my charging port during installation. It is now July and the outlet is still short circuited, still not fixed after numerous calls. On the bright side, I have my mobility aid and can leave the house again, though it now has to charge somewhere else while we wait for the technician. Meanwhile, the dedicated parking spot I waited for during all these months goes unused.
A Bit of Theory
Society is broadly designed for the norm. This can be seen in the many types of inequality that exist everywhere. Inequality because of gender, because of skin colour, religion, sexual identity, disability, to name a few. Most societies, if not all, have created a norm that excludes people who are disabled, prioritising the needs of non-disabled people. The word we use to indicate this type of discrimination is ‘ableism’.
Why do we only have tactile paving in certain spots, instead of at every road crossing? Why does the office of my job coach, who specialises in helping disabled people reintegrate into working society, have stairs to get to the front door? Why are most websites not designed in a way that makes them understandable for text-to-speech tools?
Because of societal norms we tend to exclude disabled people when we think of how to create spaces and how to interact with each other. When this way of thinking is so deeply ingrained in our collective consciousness that laws, policies, measures and processes are affected in a way that works to disadvantage disabled people, it’s called institutional discrimination, or institutional ableism.
Institutional discrimination doesn’t have to be deliberately malignant to be harmful. Simply by creating rules and processes that uphold the ‘norm’ as a status-quo without actively thinking about how to include minorities you create and reinforce a world in which there is no place for, among others, disabled people.
The Herculean Task of Doing Groceries
To summarise, because of my disabilities I now am forced into spending more money on necessary things like groceries and transport. The “disability price tag” is a symptom of systemic ableism and inequality that isn’t always visible, but hits those it affects very close to home.
The closest grocery store to my house is a 400 meter walk, which takes a non-disabled person about 5 minutes. Before I got my mobility scooter that walk would take me up to 15 minutes, after which I am exhausted and in pain. The store, because of our societal norms, doesn’t have a sitting spot to rest, or even better: wheelchairs available. So I couldn’t catch my breath before doing my shopping. A basket was too heavy to carry if I needed many things, and, because I had my cane in one hand and the basket in the other, I had to manoeuvre awkwardly to grab the things I needed. A shopping cart is big and clunky and not easy for me to move around, it doesn’t have a cane holder, and because the store is rather small it was be in the way a lot. Let’s not think about what happened when I needed to reach something on a shelf that is out of reach, be it too high or too low. And then, when I had all my things, I had paid and put it all in my bag, I would spend around 20 minutes slowly shuffling back home because the added weight of the groceries, and the exhaustion from the trip would slow me down even further. When I got home I rarely had the energy to unpack my groceries, I often collapsed onto the couch and slept for an hour to recover.
This became so exhausting and daunting that after a couple of months of struggling like this I made the decision to start ordering my groceries instead. In the Netherlands some stores do home delivery, but not all of them. Mainly, the most expensive ones do. So now I’m having to order my groceries at the most expensive supermarket of the Netherlands, finding myself paying over €80,- weekly for groceries, compared to the €45,- I pay when I was able to buy them at a cheaper store. To help out there are food banks for those who can’t afford their groceries. I am unable to go to them, for the same reasons I can’t go to the grocery store, but that doesn’t matter as I have more than €750,- in my savings account and therefore can’t apply.
Disability imposes other costs too. The Netherlands is well known for being a cyclist paradise, so I used to bike everywhere. It’s cheaper than other transport and a nice way to get some exercise in without it feeling like too much of a hassle. Why go to the gym when cycling to and from work every day gives me a nice hour long workout? Cycling was one of the first things that got hard when my pain started getting worse.
Suddenly I couldn’t cycle for more than fifteen minutes before I was in so much pain that I had to get off and sit down, and oftentimes I finished the rest of the way either walking or with public transport. The last time I got on a bike it ended up with me stranded on a bench for two hours in such severe pain I couldn’t move or speak.
That’s when I realised this wasn’t something I could do anymore. I had to make the switch to public transport if I wanted to go somewhere. So now I’m paying for every time I want to leave the house, and because I’m prone to collapse in the middle of the street I need someone with me in transit as well. Count two times the normal fare prices for every trip I’d want to make.
Not only does everything become more expensive, I also have less money to spend. For the first two years of being ill I’ve gotten ‘ziektewet’(literally: illness law), which means that when you become ill you still get part of your income. For me this fluctuates between €800,- and €950,- a month, holiday bonuses excluded. I can’t work some extra hours to get more money, as I’m struggling to find work and even then, I wouldn’t be able to make enough hours to sustain myself. I am not entitled to government support because I, just like with the food banks, have too much money in my savings account. The end result is that, like many disabled people, I ended up falling between the cracks of the support system.
The Cost of Being Disabled
Studies show that I am far from the only disabled person to struggle with this. According to a survey from last June by the Dutch College for the Rights of Humans (College voor de Rechten van de Mens) well over a third of disabled people are worried about their financial situation, more than a quarter of disabled people don’t get equal opportunities at work or during their studies, and one in three people has serious problems with finding proper help and care.
On top of that, a recent report by Nibud (a Dutch independent institute specialised in household finances) shows that chronically ill and disabled people in the Netherlands have an average additional cost of living of between €1.000,- and €4.500,- per year compared to able-bodied people. Meanwhile our government has announced new budget cuts in healthcare and social security that are projected to raise the cost of living for disabled people by another €300,- per month, or over €3.500,- per year.
Ten years ago the Netherlands promised equal rights for disabled people. In 2024 the United Nations already reprimanded our government for not doing enough to make that promise a reality. And instead of taking those warnings to heart: looking at the inequality and how to fight it, our coalition is still not only ignoring but actively worsening the unfair reality that we, disabled people in the Netherlands, have to deal with every day.
The Social Model
The way we look at chronic illness and disability, the words we use and the way we talk about it can greatly affect the way in which we treat disabled people in society. Historically, we’ve approached disability as a problem that needs to be solved. This idea stems from the medical model of disability, which states that the cause of a person’s disability is within themselves, their body or their psyche. By treating, rehabilitating or curing whatever causes it, or by limiting the symptoms they inhibit, you can solve their disability and, therefore, the ‘problem’. This model works when a) you live with something that can be cured or rehabilitated and b) there’s enough medical funding to be able to provide the needed care in an affordable way. But for many disabled and chronically ill people those things don’t apply. I myself deal with relatively unknown and understudied conditions that either can’t be cured yet or simply can’t be cured at all.
So as a counter-movement to the medical model, disability activists created the social model of disability in the late 20th century. As opposed to locating the cause of disability within a person, the social model places the cause and responsibility for disability within society. Disability is not caused by one’s impairments, but instead by the barriers people face in society, be it physical, social or attitudinal barriers. When an inaccessible and ableist society doesn’t account for impaired people it creates disability.
On the 9th of june advocacy group Ieder(in) together with Patientfederation Netherlands presented a book with personal stories from disabled people to the parliament. This was a part of the #IkKanNietMeer campaign (translation: I can’t do it anymore) that is trying to get the Dutch cabinet to scrap their planned budget cuts. They collected thousands of testimonies from chronically ill and disabled people and their loved ones who are, just like me, worried about their future.
However much I would like to end this article on a happy note, this simply is not realistic. The only effective cure for disability is true equality, which was supposed to start with the UN convention that the Netherlands signed in 2016 and still isn’t upholding to this day.. Statistics show that 30% of Dutch working age citizens deal with some form of disability. That means it’s likely that you are, or know someone, with a disability. We need to hold our government accountable, for our sakes and those of our friends, family and loved ones that are dealing with the consequences of a deeply ableist system. #IkKanNietMeer asked parliament to take responsibility. We, collectively, need to push for an answer. We, collectively, need to push for equality.
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