I work the least amount possible.
My wife already knows I’m retiring by 55 so there’s no surprises I’ll leave the country if I can’t afford it here. I don’t even do anything expensive anyways.
My employer suggested that I seek "progressive re-employment" (which is basically a form of disability) and work less so now I'm mandated to work 20h a week but somehow that increases my income substantially.
I think it's actually a bit messed up that our healthcare system sort of incentivizes this.
Basically due to my epilepsy I've racked up 800 hours of sick days this year, so I previously suggested to my boss to change my contract and decrease my salary or make my sick days unpaid. I did so because my workplace is a literal utopia in terms of location, pay, coworkers, workload, my boss, ..., and I wanted to firmly entrench my position.
My employer refused and actually gave me a raise, but a while back they apparently looked into a way to allow me to work less and shift a substantial part of my pay onto the healthcare system.
They said my account of sick days (almost all due to seizures and after-effects) would easily get me approved for this so-called progressive re-employment because my epilepsy diagnosis states it is triggered by "fatigue and/or stress" rather than the photosensitive type of epilepsy.
Wasn't even my idea in the first place but my employer suggested I ask for a 50% arrangement, which means I'm not allowed to work more than 20h a week. My employer pays my salary those 20 hours, and the other days are paid by my healthcare provider.
My boss even said "50% is fine but the percentage isn't important to us, we'll approve whatever. what's more important is your health. that's what good government and healthcare is for after all."
Couldn't believe what I was hearing when he said that, considering my employer is a large HR software company with a steady 20%+ growth/year.
The idea is of course that this isn't a permanent arrangement. Prior to this job when I was studying for my software testing courses, I had 3 seizures in one year. After getting employed full-time, this gradually racked up to a minimum of 2 seizures a month, resulting in a current total of 800 hours of sick days in my second year of being employed there. In theory, working 20h a week will vastly decrease the amount of seizures. I asked my healthcare provider to approve this arrangement for 3 months, so that it can be re-evaluated according to the impact on my amount of seizures.
I'm allowed to freely decide when I complete my 20 hours as well so it's easier to force the cost of potential sick days 100% onto my healthcare provider.
Where this gets kind of messed up is that the pay from my healthcare provider is untaxed. Of course this is reflected in my taxes to
some extent but it doesn't offset the boost to my income by any means. Overall it's roughly a 30% increase in monthly income.
With my gigantic pile of medical records and various conditions, I could likely get approved for just about any arrangement but I imagine it wouldn't be all that difficult for someone to abuse such an arrangement.
This 'approval process' consisted solely of me giving my medical records to my healthcare provider and a form signed by my neurologist stating that I am medically unfit to work more than 50%. I was never interviewed by my healthcare provider's physician, never asked any questions at all, ... and got basically immediate approval.
had pants start talking. You said your vow of silence would be over when Punk came back to WWE. No more speaking in pics, gifs, or videos.
en.wikipedia.org
gazette.com
