Despite a decade of legal promises, Iran’s disability community remains trapped in poverty, medical insecurity, and systematic neglect under the Iranian regime.
The Iranian regime has long claimed to defend the rights of people with disabilities, boasting about a legal framework meant to ensure welfare, healthcare, and empowerment. Yet nearly eight years after the revised Disability Rights Protection Law was announced in 2018, the promises remain mostly on paper. Only fragments of the law have been implemented, and even these limited steps have done little to improve the lives of millions of Iranians living with disabilities.
Activists in this field emphasize that the law’s failure is not a matter of technical delay but a consequence of systemic neglect. Since December 2018, widespread protests and repeated public appeals have highlighted the sheer scale of the crisis.
Despite this, there has been no meaningful improvement in daily living standards. The regime annually announces a 20 to 30 percent increase in disability stipends, but it has never clarified the actual base amounts or real purchasing power.
This year, for example, the monthly stipend rose from one million to 1.4 million tomans — an amount equivalent to the price of roughly one and a half kilograms of meat. Even when combined with government subsidies of 300 to 400 thousand tomans, total monthly support barely reaches three million tomans.
Meanwhile, Iran’s poverty line is now reported by experts to have climbed to as high as 30 million tomans. With such a vast gap, survival itself becomes a daily struggle, and more than 95 percent of people with disabilities remain trapped below the absolute poverty line.
Healthcare, too, has become increasingly inaccessible. As essential medications grow scarce, patient safety deteriorates across the country. According to one member of the parliamentary Health Commission, the lives of many Iranians now hang in the balance due to the shortage of vital drugs.
The regime’s removal of subsidized currency has deepened the crisis. While some officials argue for eliminating the remaining preferential currency and transferring its value to insurance funds, past attempts have proven disastrous.
When the 4,200-toman exchange rate was converted to 28,500 tomans, policymakers claimed that insurance providers would receive the difference and compensate patients. That promise never materialized. Insurance companies remain unable to secure adequate medication supplies, and patients — especially the most vulnerable — face rising costs and life-threatening shortages.
Runaway inflation has compounded the crisis further. Basic staples such as rice have soared to unprecedented prices, reportedly reaching 400,000 tomans per kilogram, compared to only 70,000 to 80,000 tomans three years earlier. Yet medical tariffs and healthcare reimbursement rates have not kept pace, leaving both patients and providers struggling under an unsustainable system.
The combined result is a landscape where people with disabilities face the harshest consequences of the Iranian regime’s economic mismanagement, corruption, and neglect.
Legal protections exist in name, but the conditions for a dignified life — adequate income, accessible healthcare, and social inclusion — remain out of reach. For millions of Iranians, the rights the regime claims to guarantee have become little more than forgotten promises.
