<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>jrs235</author><text>Yes, you can &amp;quot;float&amp;quot; for 60 days without signing up for and paying for COBRA and wait until you are in need of healthcare. After the need you can sign up but you will have to &amp;quot;back&amp;quot;pay the coverage too. So waiting to the last day will mean you owe the two previous months of premiums.</text><parent_chain><item><author>lotsofpulp</author><text>The money saving move is to pay for the insurance via COBRA only after you need healthcare, since it’s retroactive.</text></item><item><author>epc</author><text>Just experienced this with my spouse leaving Google in February.  COBRA window was 60 days from last date of employment.  We weren&amp;#x27;t going to go with COBRA until the pandemic expanded to the US, then we paid for two months.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>&amp;gt; What will the employees, in the US at least, do for health insurance? A pandemic is when you need it. These employees will be strained to pay for COBRA.&lt;p&gt;Strongly agree that health care coverage is a major concern. We have a long way to go toward an ideal situation.&lt;p&gt;Sadly, many of the people who are first to be laid off are least likely to have employer-sponsored insurance benefits in the first place (hourly jobs). If they already had ACA-subsidized healthcare plans, nothing really changes for them.&lt;p&gt;For everyone else, there are some mitigating factors:&lt;p&gt;COBRA coverage has a grace period following termination. If you opt in to COBRA coverage during this grace period, the coverage is retroactive up to your date of termination. Please check with your insurance, but I believe the minimum grace period is 30 days, although I&amp;#x27;ve personally seen higher numbers listed in my plans.&lt;p&gt;Many insurers have indicated that they will waive costs for COVID19 testing, and some have even waived copays for COVID19 treatment. I expect we&amp;#x27;ll see more pressure on this as time goes on.&lt;p&gt;This is a good time to remind everyone that a job less event triggers a special enrollment period for the ACA. Visit healthcare.gov to evaluate your insurance options. COBRA isn&amp;#x27;t the only option.</text></item><item><author>aluminussoma</author><text>What will the employees, in the US at least, do for health insurance? A pandemic is when you need it. These employees will be strained to pay for COBRA.&lt;p&gt;I fear that we will see revolutions in countries where this is not contained, from either a health or economic perspective. An old saying is that you should buy stocks when there is blood in the streets. I hope that doesn&amp;#x27;t become literal.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>Unemployment benefits have been significantly expanded under the Coronavirus aid bill. The benefit amounts will sound small if you&amp;#x27;re living in an expensive city like SF or Seattle, but $600&amp;#x2F;week from the federal government and a similar amount from state unemployment insurance means that unemployment benefits can pay up to an equivalent of $50-60K&amp;#x2F;year right now. That goes a long way in most parts of the country, especially when you&amp;#x27;re stuck at home. Of course companies are going to opt to shift people to unemployment benefits while they&amp;#x27;re forced into downtime.&lt;p&gt;In some situations, people can actually earn &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; from unemployment benefits by being laid off due to some hasty oversights in the aid package (Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cnbc.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;how-unemployed-workers-could-get-more-than-100percent-of-their-paycheck.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cnbc.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;how-unemployed-workers-could...&lt;/a&gt; ). This doesn&amp;#x27;t account for lost benefits or the risk involved in losing a job, but it could disincentivize people returning to work if it means their income will go down.&lt;p&gt;Of the many people I know who have been “laid off”, all of them have been told they’ll be first in line to be re-hired the moment quarantine ends.&lt;p&gt;If a business can’t make money, it makes more sense for them to let employees collect unemployment during the downtime than to overextend the business’s balance sheet. During normal times, this is a common tactic for seasonal businesses. I have friends in seasonal tourism industries who received training on applying for unemployment benefits during their annual off-season layoffs each year. They even have an explicit system for tracking seniority in the re-hires.&lt;p&gt;Of course, the longer this quarantine lasts, the more likely their businesses are to disappear before they can re-open. Unfortunately we won’t know this number for many months. For now, the initial unemployment claims number can&amp;#x27;t discriminate between jobs that have been temporarily paused and jobs that have been eliminated.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]</title><url>https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>jrs235</author><text>Its sounds like that&amp;#x27;s what they were holding out to do, but their 60 day window was closing so even though they didn&amp;#x27;t need healthcare they figured with what&amp;#x27;s happening they needed to execute the option and keep their insurance before losing it.</text><parent_chain><item><author>lotsofpulp</author><text>The money saving move is to pay for the insurance via COBRA only after you need healthcare, since it’s retroactive.</text></item><item><author>epc</author><text>Just experienced this with my spouse leaving Google in February.  COBRA window was 60 days from last date of employment.  We weren&amp;#x27;t going to go with COBRA until the pandemic expanded to the US, then we paid for two months.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>&amp;gt; What will the employees, in the US at least, do for health insurance? A pandemic is when you need it. These employees will be strained to pay for COBRA.&lt;p&gt;Strongly agree that health care coverage is a major concern. We have a long way to go toward an ideal situation.&lt;p&gt;Sadly, many of the people who are first to be laid off are least likely to have employer-sponsored insurance benefits in the first place (hourly jobs). If they already had ACA-subsidized healthcare plans, nothing really changes for them.&lt;p&gt;For everyone else, there are some mitigating factors:&lt;p&gt;COBRA coverage has a grace period following termination. If you opt in to COBRA coverage during this grace period, the coverage is retroactive up to your date of termination. Please check with your insurance, but I believe the minimum grace period is 30 days, although I&amp;#x27;ve personally seen higher numbers listed in my plans.&lt;p&gt;Many insurers have indicated that they will waive costs for COVID19 testing, and some have even waived copays for COVID19 treatment. I expect we&amp;#x27;ll see more pressure on this as time goes on.&lt;p&gt;This is a good time to remind everyone that a job less event triggers a special enrollment period for the ACA. Visit healthcare.gov to evaluate your insurance options. COBRA isn&amp;#x27;t the only option.</text></item><item><author>aluminussoma</author><text>What will the employees, in the US at least, do for health insurance? A pandemic is when you need it. These employees will be strained to pay for COBRA.&lt;p&gt;I fear that we will see revolutions in countries where this is not contained, from either a health or economic perspective. An old saying is that you should buy stocks when there is blood in the streets. I hope that doesn&amp;#x27;t become literal.</text></item><item><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>Unemployment benefits have been significantly expanded under the Coronavirus aid bill. The benefit amounts will sound small if you&amp;#x27;re living in an expensive city like SF or Seattle, but $600&amp;#x2F;week from the federal government and a similar amount from state unemployment insurance means that unemployment benefits can pay up to an equivalent of $50-60K&amp;#x2F;year right now. That goes a long way in most parts of the country, especially when you&amp;#x27;re stuck at home. Of course companies are going to opt to shift people to unemployment benefits while they&amp;#x27;re forced into downtime.&lt;p&gt;In some situations, people can actually earn &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; from unemployment benefits by being laid off due to some hasty oversights in the aid package (Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cnbc.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;how-unemployed-workers-could-get-more-than-100percent-of-their-paycheck.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cnbc.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;03&amp;#x2F;27&amp;#x2F;how-unemployed-workers-could...&lt;/a&gt; ). This doesn&amp;#x27;t account for lost benefits or the risk involved in losing a job, but it could disincentivize people returning to work if it means their income will go down.&lt;p&gt;Of the many people I know who have been “laid off”, all of them have been told they’ll be first in line to be re-hired the moment quarantine ends.&lt;p&gt;If a business can’t make money, it makes more sense for them to let employees collect unemployment during the downtime than to overextend the business’s balance sheet. During normal times, this is a common tactic for seasonal businesses. I have friends in seasonal tourism industries who received training on applying for unemployment benefits during their annual off-season layoffs each year. They even have an explicit system for tracking seniority in the re-hires.&lt;p&gt;Of course, the longer this quarantine lasts, the more likely their businesses are to disappear before they can re-open. Unfortunately we won’t know this number for many months. For now, the initial unemployment claims number can&amp;#x27;t discriminate between jobs that have been temporarily paused and jobs that have been eliminated.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]</title><url>https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf</url></story>