That self verification for sick being eliminated is an absolute no go for me. I don't think everyone understands the impact that this has.

For a basic example - Lets say a pilot uses 120 sick hours in a year. If distributed evenly, that would be 10 hrs a month. Using the lookback he would always maintain above 100 sick hours used, therefore he would have to verify everything! He'd never have access to unverified time. Essentially this policy reduces our effective unverified time.

With the policy we have now, I always got a note if I went to the Dr. I saved unverified time as to use for things that are a waste of time to make an appointment or impossible/difficult to diagnose. I verify close to 95% of my time already, I just don't want to take it in the shorts for that 5%.

Even with the more stringent verification, we need language that has the company pay for and Dr visits for the purpose of verification. Why should that come out of my pocket?

I realize that someone calling in sick 10 hours evenly distributed throughout the year is unlikely, but think of scenarios where 1 trip can severely impact a pilot. What if a pilot bids 5 day trips? What about 12 day trips? You can start to see how it's easy to get to the 100 hrs, then suffer the consequences for a year afterwards.

We work more, we have higher ALVs, and we are an aging pilot group. That's plenty of reason to want to protect sick leave.