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Comment by pmiller2 | Hacker News Reader

> Individuals who are unable to work due to having or being exposed to COVID-19 (certified by a medical professional) can file a Disability Insurance (DI) claim.

> Disability Insurance provides short-term benefit payments to eligible workers who have full or partial loss of wages due to a non-work-related illness, injury, or pregnancy. Benefit amounts are approximately 60-70 percent of wages (depending on income) and range from $50 - $1,300 a week.

This isn't going to be enough to cover a lot of peoples' monthly expenses. After taxes, $1300/week barely covers my rent, much less food and other necessities.

Edit: does anyone downvoting care to actually explain why they disagree? Or, are y'all just offended by the statement?

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Well, first of all, SDI is not taxed by the feds or by California except when used as a replacement for unemployment insurance (it is paid for by taxes and you just accrue a benefit when you make a claim—it is not taxed again) so there’s a critical flaw in your reasoning. Secondly, I think the idea that someone could not make do on $5200 a month would strike many people as shocking, especially given that puts you above the median American. Most people are more precarious than that.

I understand HN skews more toward extremely expensive CoL areas of California, so I grant that there may be many people here who legitimately could not although I don’t think SDI should be expected to cover 100% of living expenses for extremely highly compensated individuals in the most expensive area to live in the state.

That aside, SDI is one of the best public goods California has. I had surgery this past year and was able to take 3 months off work with no impact to my financial situation. The benefit almost replaced my take home pay (since, again, it was not taxed) and then my company topped it off. It was sort of surreal to be paid equivalently for not working. Unaccustomed to that as an American.

This is a fair point. If the goal is avoid community spread then we really need 100% wage coverage and quick testing. Otherwise anyone without an emergency fund still has a very difficult choice to make if they come down with symptoms.

That's simply not the point of the CA SDI fund. If you want better SDI insurance, perhaps you could have bought some for yourself.

Does Aflac cover time away for work due to COVID-19?

I am not arguing the "point" of the CA SDI fund. I am merely stating that it's insufficient for the use case of "pay[ing] people unable to work because of COVID-19." Do you really think every barista and service worker in California should have private SDI insurance, just in case a plague strikes?

Well, you can pay for the insurance (one way or another) or you can self-insure out of your own savings. It's not magic.

Paying the country to take a week off would cost something on the order of $125 billion, to say nothing of the knock-on effects.

In any case, there is a minuscule number people who are unable to work because of COVID-19 relative to the total number of people unable to work on a short-term basis for all other reasons.

A perceived sense of entitlement, perhaps? Do people have the right to maintain their lifestyles during tragedy at the expense of their fellow taxpayers? In some cases, maybe, but it also doesn't hurt to prepare so one can weather a crisis without being too reliant on others.

A cap of $1,300 a week means more than just a lifestyle cut in some areas of California.

Indeed. $1300/week (gross), annualized, is $67.6k. Try living on that in the Bay Area.

Hmm... during an internship I lived on substantially less than that in the bay area, just because I wanted to save the rest of my income for the school year.

Supporting a family on that if you're the single household income might be a bit tight. Paying rent on a nice house could easily swallow it (though a nice house isn't a basic necessity) - but 67.6k really is a fair amount of money. It's more than the median income in Oakland. 2x that (i.e. both parents working) is more than the median income in SF.

$67600 is not even enough to qualify for a $1900/month 1 BR apartment in the East Bay. You have to keep in mind, we’re primarily talking about working adults here. Tech interns are not the ones who are going to be affected by this.

Edit: also, keep in mind that if there’s a second working adult in the household, both are likely to be impacted.

We aren't talking about living on this amount of money long term here, you don't need to be able to qualify for an apartment on it, you just need to be able to continue paying your rent for a few months. If you need to live on this amount of money long term, move.

I was keeping in mind that both adults would be effected... that's why I was using the disability pay rates for both adults in the above.

Ok, so, you just want to punish people who, for whatever reason, haven't accumulated an emergency fund. I'm going to assume that you mean this in the most charitable sense of "their budgeting does not allow them to accumulate an emergency fund," because a bank balance is a point in time view and not always reflective of overall financial health. (Speaking of which, how would you determine that? Require 6 months of bank statements to apply for disability insurance? That seems awfully intrusive.)

I'm sure you're familiar with the study that says 4 in 10 Americans can't cover a $400 unexpected expense? Well, it doesn't quite say that [0], but it does cite a study that says only 24% of households have $400 in liquid assets. And, it also says that 14% of households would not be able to pay some bills if such an expense arose, and 12% could not cover the expense at all (I'm unclear if the 12% overlaps with the 14% though).

Are you saying you're okay with those people taking the first step into total financial ruin, just because of something they have little or no control over (becoming temporarily unable to work due to disability)? And, I'll ask again: why should one's bank balance affect one's ability to claim benefits when one paid into the system in order to fund those very benefits?

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[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...

I don't appreciate you putting words in my mouth.

I have never said I wanted to punish anyone.

I have never suggested looking at bank balances - in fact I explicitly argued against this the only time I mentioned it.

You are arguing against a straw man.

That said - I have no interest in replying to the content of the argument - I stay away from arguing about things on the internet where there is no right side. The general question of what to do is too political for me to approach here. All I am willing to do, and have done in my comments, is respond to clearly incorrect statements.

The idea that you need to make 3x the income of rent is kinda asinine and unreasonable in the first place.

You think spending more 1/3 of your gross income on housing is sensible? Keep in mind that 1/3 of gross is probably more like 1/2 of take-home.

Spending over 50% of your take home income on housing is better than being homeless. Especially when that leaves $2000 or more a month for all other expenses.

How much are other states giving?

How is that relevant, when the article is referencing California specifically?

Because everyone is complaining about the amount of the benefits in California. I want to see what other states offer in comparison.

The point is, it's probably not enough to live on for people who may already be in a precarious financial state, anyway. No comparison is needed to make that point.

Sure but it looks like most states don't offer anything better. Most offer none.

Covid-19 infection is not a lifestyle "entitlement" contrary to your claim. It's obviously a disability that prevents you from being able to work and absolutely people who get it should receive the disability INSURANCE payments they were forced to pay in to for years. How is an insurance claim on an insurance policy one has been forced to pay for an "entitlement" anyway, in your opinion? Care to explain that one?

To be clear, I didn't downvote - my first sentence was only pointing out the potential thought process of someone who might have. My opinion is that some level of payout is a good idea, but it should be balanced with one's own prepardness.

In this context, "preparedness" seems to mean "liquid savings," since we're talking about being forced to not work for a period of days to weeks. Are you saying DI should be means tested, and that people should have to exhaust their savings that they worked for before they're eligible for assistance?

Rather I believe they are referring to the ability to prepare, i.e. we don't measure people's savings but look at their income level (and perhaps number of dependents) and decide what we think their emergency fund should be.

Which seems far more reasonable to me than actually measuring savings. We don't want to punish people for creating emergency funds.

No, it does not, because we don’t want to punish people from becoming unable to work, either.

Uh... both of the two proposed systems I was comparing above do that to some extent, so that seems like a non reply.

No, my reply is a statement of how temporary disability benefits are utterly inadequate. See the other subthread for what I think of your proposal to punish people with inadequate emergency funds.

So what is the "it" in "No, it does not" referring to then? Because no part of my comment addresses whether or not temporarily disability benefits are or are not adequate. Rather it only expresses a preference towards how to implement them under the assumption that you are going to implement them in a means tested fashion.

Thanks. As I see it it is beneficial to society to avoid putting the quarantined in such desperate situations as they have no reasonable choice but to break quarantine. They need their needs taken care of to prevent them losing all they have worked for, they need regular delivered meals, they need things to prevent them going insane whether that be books or notebooks and pens or Netflix access or whatever.

Critically deprived people reasonably go insane, escape isolation, and become spreaders. Thus it is a matter of public health not to deprive people.

Perhaps not "maintain their lifestyles," but certainly to be able to afford to live and have basic necessities. There are many workers who, faced with being quarantined for weeks or days, or going to work to earn money to live, would choose the latter, at everyone else's expense. What do "the taxpayers" think of that?

That's a good point.

It's an insurance payout that everyone is forced to pay premiums for out of every paycheck. CA SDI tax is 1% on the first $122,909 earned.

Of course the payout is capped, so anyone earning more than maybe $30k is subsidizing the insurance pool, but anyone who qualifies for SDI should absolutely claim it, because it's a benefit they have been paying for.

Not everyone pays the same percentage out of every paycheck. The US tax code is setup to avoid people getting six+ figures from these programs as that would create huge political blowback. Just picture a CEO who runs their company into the ground and then gets X0 million from unemployment insurance.

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