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Comment by uniqueuid | Hacker News Reader

That's exactly right.

This article [1] mentions 40% of sick days being from people with long-term (> 6 weeks) illnesses. That's data from one of Germany's large insurers. While I don't know the proportion of those with long-term illnesses, if we assume it's at most 10%, then the average for people with "normal" short-term illnesses is at most 12 days. So much lower.

[1] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sind-die-deutschen-wirklich-h...

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> from one of Germany's large insurers

Is this voluntary insurance? It changes meaning to the statistic to % from those that made an insurance.

I assume you mean there might be a self-selection issue with people who are voluntarily ("privately") insured, as compared to those who have the normal state-mandated ("gesetzlich") insurance?

This data is from AOK which is one of the state-mandated insurers. It insures around 2M people, and my gut feeling is that they are not terribly unrepresentative of the workforce as a whole.

But of course the point is, everyone with a tiny bit of true data could tell much more precise stories, and the journalists (as usual) didn't care or didn't think it would fly with readers.

AOK insured 27 million in 2021, couldn't find a more recent number.

Whoops, misread the digit! Thanks for catching.

But the numbers are still the same (it's about rates not counts), just that we can expect the 40% figure to be more accurate than with 2M.

In Germany you need an insurance, but you can choose which one. In Berlin at least I remember TK was the default, but you can choose others.

For clarification, “default” above doesn’t mean “In Berlin you get insured with TK by default”, and rather “Most people in Berlin will recommend choosing TK over a different state-mandated insurer”. TK was also very popular when I was back in university in Frankfurt. It might just still be the one with reasonable prices!

IIRC you can move from TK to others freely, but if you move to some options there are conditions to come back.

TK service via email, phone, etc is amazing, even if your German is not very good, as it was the case for me the first year.

In Germany there’s private insurance which can only be chosen by people of higher salary and good health because the rate depends on their condition when they sign up. So this data would be biased towards sick people, people doing jobs that are more likely to make you sick, and people who are financially less well off.

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