The equivalent of a small Belgian municipality flows directly from sickness benefits to retirement every year. In 2020, the most recent year in the Riziv's figures, this numbered 15,904 long-term sick people – almost 10% of the total number of Belgians who retired, wrote De Standaard.
Specifically, 'long-term sick' means all workers who have been unfit for work for more than one year and have since returned to sickness benefits. Of those 15,904 long-term sick people in 2020, three-quarters had been unfit for work for more than five years at the time of retirement. 2,817 workers had even been long-term sick for more than 20 years.
The PVDA (socialist workers party) points mainly to the sharp rise among the long-term sick who dropped out just before retirement and were thus only sick for one or two years. In 2016, this numbered 742. In 2020, that already almost doubled to 1,306.
