Talk of welfare reform usually triggers strong emotions and yesterday's revamp of incapacity benefit (IB), a tough policy legacy from the Thatcher era, is no exception. Ministers are routinely accused by campaigners and academics of failing to understand the deep-seated problems of chronically ill, disabled or mentally unstable people.
On the other side, self-styled welfare radicals such as Labour's Frank Field (not to mention Tory newspapers) argue that another shakeup is about to fail to grasp the nettle of workshy claimants, organised by talented people who know how to beat the system and live off the state.
Labour's great claim is to have taken the essentially passive system it inherited in 1997 - where claimants were paid with few questions asked, and left to rot quietly - and turned it into a proactive one. What started with Gordon Brown's New Deal for the long-term and (later) young unemployed is working its way through the system via Brownite slogans such as "Something for something".
Yesterday's reform, the fruit of last year's legislation, emerged from a cross-party consensus in which the predicted leftwing revolt failed to materialise. Loyalists even say poverty lobbyists are basically onside. What the change does is to abolish IB, currently claimed by 2.6 million people, and replace it with a two-tier employment and support allowance (ESA) in which all claimants will be paid the same basic £60.50 a week as the jobseeker's allowance (JSA). Those deemed by a doctor (not their own GP) to be work-incapable will get a higher level of allowance.
Some "customers" - as the jargon now has it - will be fast-tracked to the higher payment, including "those with a terminal illness", James Purnell's Department for Work and Pensions guidelines dryly explains. But those who can do some work will receive an employment component only on condition that they take part in employability schemes. Conditionality on a non-means-tested benefit is new.
This is sensitive territory. Whenever critics raise problems, ministers such as Jonathan Shaw, who took over the disability brief in last month's reshuffle, reply: "So you want us to do nothing?" Most people want to work; it is the best way out of poverty and ill-health, they say.
Quite right too, but personal support is crucial. The Access to Work budget can provide physical or emotional support to get people working (taxis to work for a blind person or a signer for the deaf), support which may extend to employers who can't afford it or fear commitment to those with "fluctuating [mental] conditions".
Optimists hope to cut the stubborn IB/ESA roll - partly the legacy of Thatcher's shakeout of workers in old industries, but increasingly made up of stressed women with mental health problems too - by up to a million. Pessimists, including Durham University researcher Dr Clare Bambra, warn that multiple issues are at work, including poverty and a tendency to disguise mental problems as physical.
They fear punitive tabloid language and money-saving motives, reinforced by coercion, all based on slender evidence. Nonsense, reply the loyalists. Is the glass half full or half empty?