Bavaria: The majority of hearing-impaired people get nothing from a special payment

Munich (dpa/lby) - Of the approximately 20,000 deaf and severely hearing-impaired people in Bavaria, not even half are entitled to the special corona payment of 145 euros decided by the state parliament.

Bavaria: The majority of hearing-impaired people get nothing from a special payment

Munich (dpa/lby) - Of the approximately 20,000 deaf and severely hearing-impaired people in Bavaria, not even half are entitled to the special corona payment of 145 euros decided by the state parliament. Only 9,472 people had the "GI mark" mentioned in the state parliament resolution as a prerequisite for payment, according to a response from the Ministry of Social Affairs to a request from the Greens in the state parliament. "This is a slap in the face for many of those affected in Bavaria," said Kerstin Celina, socio-political spokeswoman for the Greens in Munich on Thursday.

From Celina's point of view, the payment should not be based on the GI characteristic but on the extent of the hearing loss: The state government selected the group that receives the payment "wrongly and only according to the criterion of cost savings. That is shameful." According to the ministry, around 10,000 people with a bilateral hearing loss of at least 80 percent did not have the mark. You are not entitled to the 145 euros that should be paid out as compensation for special difficulties in the Corona crisis. According to the ministry, 4,426 applications for a one-off payment for the deaf have already been approved (as of December 12, 2022).

The mark Gl is given to people who are deaf on both sides or who suffer from hearing loss bordering on deafness with severe speech disorders - this is characterized by a hard-to-understand spoken language with a small vocabulary. As a rule, these are hearing-impaired people whose hearing loss bordering on deafness was congenital or acquired in childhood.

The Greens also criticized the fact that no deaf allowances were included in the draft budget for the coming year. "The Free State must finally create a permanent equalization of opportunities for people with hearing impairments. The Ministry of Social Affairs has deliberately put off this for years," criticizes Claudia Köhler, spokeswoman for budgetary policy for the parliamentary group.