Including sick days makes the calculation worse, not better. Sick days typically don't exist in Europe. If you're sick, you obviously just don't go to work. What's the point of infecting the whole office?
On average, workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation. In fact, if you're sick during vacation, that doesn't count as vacation time, at least in some European countries.
> "workers in Europe take about 2 to 3 weeks off each year due to sickness in addition to their vacation"
It looks like in Germany it's 20 days a year - https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sick-days-absentees-mental-hea...
Are you all really that sick? Shouldn't the availability of lots of sick time and your "superior" healthcare system decrease your illness levels? Doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
A lot of those sick days are also childcare.
You can't just not show up for work and call in sick. Within the same day you have to call your doctor and explain the symptoms and they have to start the paperwork for the sick leave. Even if it is for a day.
For a cold or a cough you would not get sick leave, though.
In my country we get paid 80% of our usual pay on sick days prescribed by doctor.
We also can get an appointment online and get that sick day. We can also get sick days up to 3 days prior.
Also you can get a sick day if your kid is sick.
Sick leave in my country is not full paid, it is 80%, so people are not that keen on getting it if not needed. On the other hand they are not hit that dramatically if they are sick.
If you want to measure general health, you could go for example for life expectancy. Or if you care about the healthcare system itself you could go for infant/maternal mortality. Or if you want to measure efficiency you could go for spending per capita.
Life expectancy in the US is lower because we're all overweight. Infant mortality isn't a standardized metric, so it really shouldn't be used to compare health systems, even though people try to do so all of the time. A lot of infant mortality in the US is due to there being 1.5-2x as many births to mothers under the age of 20 (versus what one might see in Europe), which is really a societal problem, not a healthcare problem.
- If I don't get paid my full salary when I'm sick and I need the money, I'll go to work sick and infect others. I can't afford to not make it someone else's problem.
- If there's a strong culture of "people aren't really sick, they're just lazy" or an implicit "people that take too much time off are less likely to be promoted", I'll go in sick.
Well, no. These are averages. Obviously, some people take more sick days than others; e.g. women with severe period pains might take days off each month.
> Shouldn't the availability of lots of sick time and your "superior" healthcare system decrease your illness levels?
Sick days are not just for "illness", so they aren't an indicator for overall health.
> Doesn't seem to make any sense to me.
I could make a snarky response about US education or something, but instead, I just want to point out that I find it strange how people in bad situations often defend their circumstances, rather than trying to change them.
In most places in Europe the first sick days are not comped, so any missed day is a missed paid day. When social security comes into play they tend to pay the base pay of the position.
That would mean that if you miss a week because of an illness you might see a salary reduction close to a fifth of your monthly salary. That's something that most people don't have the luxury.
Apart of that most companies treat any medical leave after the third (yearly) as suspicious, which needs extra investigation.
So as we might not have a limit, and it's relatively paid, most people do meagre use of it.
I don't think that's true.