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Germany bans workers from calling in sick
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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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?
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.