Catusbusdrivr
Lot of truth in your post.
When I joined a US major the medical benefits were great and no one argued with time off for sickness. By the time I left, the medical claims were handled by an outside company whose job was to try to reduce company costs to as little as possible and blame any problems you had on your own bad health habits. You could still get time off but with the underlying threat that too much time off could be considered as unreliability and could eventually count against you.
The result was that people, especially junior pilots, dragged themselves into work to fly when they should have been at home in bed. All of this because management cared more about the shareholders dividend than they did about having healthy pilots at work. Until this attitude is changed by regulation I would not trust any airline management with a health care decision.