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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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