Companies enhance stress for mutual insurance coverage firms to offer all medical discharges and discharges to employees | Economy | EUROtoday

The robust and rising enhance in medical go away processes amongst employees is an issue that nobody is avoiding and is a reason behind concern for employers, unions and the Government itself. The query now’s how you can deal with the issue, and the options offered by each events are very completely different from one another. The employers’ affiliation of Catalan SMEs, Pimec, which has lots of weight in Parliament by way of its good relationship with Junts, introduced this Wednesday in Madrid a sequence of proposals that defend the employers’ pursuits and amongst which one stands out: that the docs of the mutual societies that collaborate with Social Security can provide all of the registrations and cancellations to the employees.

Currently, mutual societies are hybrid entities, as a result of they’re associations of businessmen, however not for revenue, which might be licensed and managed by the Ministry of Social Security. They handle public cash (social contributions) and likewise assist handle momentary incapacity advantages for employees who’re on sick go away. The legislation solely permits docs from these entities to offer discharges in instances wherein the discharge has occurred on account of a piece accident. However, sick go away, whatever the origin of the pathology (on account of an accident or frequent sickness), can solely be given by docs within the public major care system.

Historically, employers have demanded that mutual insurance coverage docs have the ability to give sick go away on account of frequent sicknesses, however this proposal has by no means come to fruition. Now Pimec goes one step additional and likewise requests that these docs, whose employer is a mutual insurance coverage firm, also can decide employees’ sick go away. “It is incoherent that mutual insurance companies can discharge sick leave due to accident and sick leave and not the rest of the high time. A doctor is just as ethical and a good person if he leaves his home to work at a mutual insurance company or at a health center,” defended the final secretary of Pimec, Josep Ginesta.

Airef itself, devoted to auditing public insurance policies, has simply denounced structural deficiencies within the sick go away administration system. One of those deficiencies is, in accordance with Pimec, that “the one who recognizes the sick leave and gives the new sick leave (primary care doctors dependent on the autonomous communities) are not the ones who pay them (Social Security dependent on the State) and the companies (which pay between the 4th and 16th day of the sick leave). “This could be solved by giving this energy to the mutual insurance coverage firms,” these employer leaders emphasize.

What’s more, the employers’ association of Catalan SMEs has indicated that, in their opinion “incorrectly”, the management of mutual societies had in recent years drifted towards public management to a greater extent than private management, which is why this organization also demands that this situation be reversed. To this end, they propose that the obligation to allocate mutual benefits to a reserve fund disappear, something that has always been rejected by successive governments and by unions.

The president of Pimec, Antoni Cañete, has made a second proposal to solve the increase in sick leave, which has to do with the design of the current salary supplements, which are included in many collective agreements, to compensate for temporary disability benefits, the amount of which is lower than the salary. According to him, these supplements act as a “name impact” so that workers are more likely to go to the doctor to ask for sick leave, because they prevent them from losing money. For this reason, these business leaders have explained that their representatives in the agreement negotiations have already begun to demand a reformulation of these supplements so that they are paid in the first sick leave, but decrease if these sickness absence processes are repeated in the same year, for example.

Now, Pimec will make a “round with all the parliamentary groups” to try to get them to endorse the employers’ demands, through legislative proposals, especially with amendments to the possible legal texts that reach Parliament as a result of the current negotiation in the social dialogue to modify the management of sick leave. In addition, the employers’ association will meet this Thursday with the Minister of Social Security, Elma Saiz, to whom they will convey their proposals.

The figures

The figures from the exhaustive report prepared by the Observatori de la pime de Catalunya for Pimec, with official data from the INE, Social Security and the mutual insurance company (AMAT), show evidence of this growing problem. During the period analyzed (2013-2025) the average hours lost by each worker per month have gone from 3.7 hours to 8.2 hours. Which means an average of one hour lost per month for each employee.

This study, in any case, shows that this is an average because some workers are never on sick leave and others have many sick days. Thus, more than 50% of workers have had two or more sick leave processes in their working life, while half of workers also account for more than 75% of all episodes of temporary disability.

According to the calculations of this work, the average annual cost of these sick leave for the company per hired worker is 2,459 euros per year. In aggregate terms, the costs of sick leave to the State and companies could amount to up to 162,000 million annually (equivalent to 10.2% of GDP) in 2024. This figure is broken down as follows: 15,014 million in temporary disability benefits paid by Social Security; another 14.1 billion paid by the companies corresponding to the salary from the fourth day of absence until the 16th (from then on it is assumed by Social Security); and 133,448 million more for the opportunity cost (what the sick worker stops producing).

The study also highlights that the greatest number of absences occur in large industrial companies, “though the magnitude of the affect of absences for that reason is way larger in SMEs,” stated Ginesta. Likewise, it has drawn consideration to the sharp enhance in discharges on account of psychological sickness, which have grown by 112% between 2017 and 2024, in comparison with a rise of 47% in complete processes in that interval.