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.

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?

Germany about to start burning workers for energy

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.

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.