The sick people

Swedes!
We are the sickest people in Europe, this of course, has no relation to the fact that we have extremely generous benefits. Johnny Munkhammar's blog (In Swedish) talks about this very good, I have translated pieces for the benefit of non-Swedish speaking(/reading) people.

The average working person in Sweden paid last year about 30.000 SEK (US$ 4.200) to the people on sickleave. In the period 2000 to 2004 on average 14% of the Swedish population in working age were either on sickleave or early retirement, this was the highest number in the EU.
Sick leaves are increasing faster than the annual growth of the economy, add to this the (official) 6% unemployed, totally 20% of the workforce. Without breaking a sweat we can add 5% more to this number with all people not working or in unemployment schemes, this will now render the number 25% of the workforce, one full quarter living off taxes from the working part of the population. (My note: Remember we are only counting the people in the workforce, not total population). These 25% not only lives off the taxes, they do not contribute any products or services back to society. Statistics does not show that the rate of these early retirements or sick leaves are decreasing, quite the opposite, they are increasing. This is what is behind the speeches about helping the sick and unemployed, they are made dependent on public funds. Most of them would like to work if they just got the chance. Unless politicians were so eager to buy their votes with money from people that work"

This is wellwritten By Mr Munkhammar, question is what are we going to do.
The Swedish economy is growing, however the number of jobs are not, quite the contrary the rate has climbed somewhat. The Socialist also quite recently passed a law stating that the company has to pay more money when the staff is on sick leave, not only do they increase the benefits, they also dump the cost on the companies, soon smaller companies will require a illness history before hiring any staff. I guess this will be good days for the temp agencies though, just the development the Socialists say they want to stop. Aren't they cute?

Sincerely
Mr SIlence Dogood