German workers will have to report to a doctor in person to get a sick note on the first day they are ill, under strict proposals from Friedrich Merz.
designed to boost the stagnating economy
yeah I’m sure this will make up for the loss of cheap natural gas from Russia
Germany about to start burning workers for energy
So like if you have the flu, you have to go out in public and expose other people to get your paper signed? Was gonna say something about a doctors lobby, but Germany must have some variation of public healthcare, so this would just make it worse and more over burdened (maybe this is the idea, secondary to disciplining labor)
In Germany, the “public” healthcare operates unbelievably inefficiently. Instead of having mainly a centralized healthcare system composed of polyclinics with family doctors for general purpose visits and hospitals for specialized diagnosis and treatment, what they have is a decentralized system in which each doctor can create their own clinic and can decide whether to accept or not publicly insured patients. If they do, then when a publicly insured patient goes to a doctor, they have to scan their insurance card and the doctor gets paid by the public insurance based on the treatment, e.g. (making up the numbers) 30€ for a general diagnosis or 1000€ for an XRay.
Doctors absolutely have economic incentives to keep their clinics incredibly busy and to treat patients as fast as possible and to over diagnose them as much as possible (since the payment for a more complicated treatment is often much more juicy than that of simple stuff). Doctors in Germany are filthy rich, and most family doctors WON’T ACCEPT BOOKINGS and instead will treat patients based on order of arrival, which means in Germany people queue outdoors since 6am sick as fuck in winter waiting for doctor to open, because otherwise you won’t get into the doctor’s office. They don’t accept booked appointments because if the patient doesn’t come, they lose 30€.
Germany is an incredible shithole, I had the displeasure of living there for some years and my experiences with the medical system left me astonished and enraged.
What if they use telehealth? I’d talk to an AI if it auto emailed my workplace after offering no resistance if I had the flu
Though tech obviously isn’t the answer because the question isn’t the feasibility of of accepting volume of routine cases. The question is why would they pass such a shitty law so disrespectful of disease, autonomy, and logistics?
What if they use telehealth? I’d talk to an AI if it auto emailed my workplace after offering no resistance if I had the flu
Nope, this is also specifically not possible under that law. Doctors could write sick leaves via telephone during the Corona years, but smart economists diagnosed that as a source of malingering as well, so we can’t have that.
Also I don’t think anyone who hasn’t experienced it first hand can understand the intensity of German obsession with paper. Everything has to be printed out.
The thing is that in Germany you can only introduce digital systems by letting each state make it’s own system and they aren’t allowed to be any good.
If he thinks this will “boost” the economy then he’s in for a rude awakening, this will cause the overcrowded doctors offices to be even more crowded.
He and the green party are the main culprits for why the economy is stagnating and the longer he’s in office the worse it will get.
I wonder if the main idea was to include something so stupid that it would act like a lightning rod for the news coverage, so that this ends up in the headline instead of their real goals like raising the pension age. Then later they can walk this back and say they listened to the people, while the proposal to tie the pension age to life expectancy will still go through.
Why not both? Have it act as a media cover AND pass it anyway!
Germans, on average, take about three weeks, or 15 working days, of sick leave per year.
Fucking hell that is quite high considering it’s 4.4 here in the UK.
We don’t force people to get sicknotes for every bit of time off though lmao. You require one after 7 days absence.
Not convinced that this high figure is caused by the lack of sicknote requirement.
yeah the UK culture for working when sick is atrocious. People regularly clocking in despite having hyper contagious diseases, even in the food industry, or just straight up guilt and puritanism that makes you guilty to dare turn up late to the bullshit factory
I get nine fully-paid sick days, which is unusually high in the UK (the standard is 0). SSP in the UK is basically nothing (and until last month WAS nothing for the first week), so people typically have no choice if they want to eat food and live in their home. Is German statutory sick pay meaningfully higher?
To be honest if I was actually off work when I genuinely should be, it probably would average about 15 days a year.
You can be sick for 6 weeks in Germany with full pay. But there are countries with significantly less generous sick leave systems that have more sick days.
So these are unenacted proposals? Bad form by Telegraph to use past tense in the title.
So these are unenacted proposals?
This was signed into law yesterday and will be enforced starting January 1st.
There’s a small chance it will enrage the medical practitioner community, Germany has a history of repealing some rather insane attempts at forcing neoliberalism. For example, 15 years ago there was a “practitioner fee” of 10 Eurinos for every doctor visit (“this will curb down on wasteful doctors visits!”) - got canned after a couple of years. Or, also 15 years ago they introduced college fees and had to abandon it after a couple of years as well. Might do the same here.
Ah yes implementing the finest Polish ideas, Poland totally has no issue with fake doctor’s notes because physicians in Poland famously have high integrity (as long as you don’t check what happened in Warsaw recently)
