I still wish I had 130 days of sick time, but even better if it was with my schedule. Take 2-3 days off each week when my current schedule is only a 3 day work week to begin with....talk about a dream job, working one day every two weeks!
As for the OP, if you want to stop abuse of sick days then the whole system needs to be revamped. Who wouldn't take a day off WITH FULL PAY? Sure, some people would if the really have a sense of pride in their work, but most people won't. I think one possible solution would be to make 'sick days' be only 50% pay.
What a horrible way to provide sick days. It seems intentionally designed to make the employee feel like any day off is one step closer to discipline.
Now that I think it over, what I explained with the step system was for absenteeism, not specifically sick days. How do other companies deal with absenteeism (if it exceeds the number of allocated sick days)?
The 'worst case' scenario I posted earlier has the other extreme that a worker could exploit and that would be to say, miss 12 days in a month, get their paid day off for the decision day, then go 6 months without missing a day and get a clean record and then repeat the process for the next 7 months, so an average of 20 or so days a year of being 'sick'. But that's playing with fire, since it's easy to miss one day due to events beyond your control.
Since we have sick hours, we don't have sick days. You can start using the sick hours on the second day in a row you are sick (for the first day you can use personal time, deferred holidays or vacation). I've never been sick two days in a row to use them, so I'm not sure if a doctor's note is needed.
Since I'm maxed out my sick hours the hours I would normally accumulate is transferred to personal time, so when I take a day off I'm technically using my personal time but I had actually earned it as sick time.