21,000 addicts on incapacity benefit for 10 years

Theres an interesting article on the BBC today (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13152349) about how 80,000 addicts are claiming incapacity benefit, whilst 22,000 of those have been on it for 10 years. With each person earning up to £4,700 per year, it adds up to quite a lot. However, what figure was more shocking to me was that out of the 2 million people on incapacity benefit (thats roughly 3% of the total population), over 900,000 haven't worked in ten years. For those 900,000 people the welfare bill adds up to over 4 BILLION pounds per year. (To put that into context, thats roughly £100 for every person over 16 in work in the UK) Now I'm not suggesting that all of these people are hypochondriacs or anything like that, but lets not forget that who is ultimately paying for all of these benefits, the taxpayer. Obviously many of these people will have serious illnesses, but I find it hard to believe that 1/60 people in the total UK population can't do any work at all. IB should be a "safety net", not a lifestyle. The incentive should be on what jobs you can do, not those which you can't. And if anybody dares to say thats the government crackdown is for "ideological" purposes, they should start giving a considerable proportion of their wages to charity, before they make everybody else pay for these benefits.