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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Sounds amazing, I wish someone would lay me off like that, damn. Four months PTO with healthcare?!

It's confusing. Some read it as "COBRA is available at full price" and others as "healthcare paid by AirBNB". My understanding is COBRA is just the default. The company can't really block it, for 18 months. No action required.

So if AirBNB went out of their way to mention COBRA, it likely means they're covering it.

It's not. In this economy 3 months will pass by in split seconds and you may still not have job.

You actually have to pay the full premium for healthcare. But still, assuming a months pay covers at least 3 months of Cobra coverage, that is 3 months PTO to get your head straight.

As I recall, COBRA is pretty expensive.

I believe it's just the full cost of the plan you were already on, the sum of what you and your employer were paying for it.

So it can be expensive if your employer was paying a lot for it.

It can seem expensive if you ignored the compensation your employer was paying while you were employed.

for someone that just lost their job having to pay basically double what you were paying for health insurance it certainly is expensive from their pov. health care in america is not something any other country would ask to have save some esoteric elective surgery out of pocket if you are rich.

I think I've only had one job where the employer funded $ amount of my health plan was actually spelled out. My expected contribution was always made known at enrollment time but the employer contribution was left to blind speculation.

FWIW "Employer Paid Benefits" are shown on TriNet pay statements. TriNet is a fairly common PEO among startups.

They wanted like $1400/month for family coverage when I left my last job. I rolled the dice and went without it. It's available retroactively so if you need it later you can sign up for it.

The crazyness of the best country in the world. "I rolled the dice!". This looks insane to any non-American.

Unfortunately not to some here in Switzerland. The average adult here pays around $350 USD/month for just their coverage, according to official statistics. The total cost for a family might end up less than $1400, but not by much.

Edited to add source: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/new-method_health-insur...

A COBRA plan can be about ~$500-1000 for an individual in the US. A family can reach $2000-5000/month. Then, you are still sometimes left holding the bag for deductibles, co-pays, co-insurance and annual out-of-pocket maximums. Old but not way off: [1]. Some folks are better off on the private markets, especially exchanges.

[1] https://www.bankrate.com/finance/insurance/cobra-health-insu...

> A COBRA plan can be about ~$500-1000 for an individual in the US. A

A COBRA plan is just continuation of the same plan, at the same cost (except that the ex-employee now covers whatever part was paid by the employer), as you had when employed.

> Some folks are better off on the private markets, especially exchanges.

Rarely for an equivalent quality plan if they were in a large group plan, which are usually better than individual plans, even exchange plans, on a cost/benefit basis. Excluding, of course, consideration of exchange subsidies if the ex-employee would qualify based on their reduced income.

Anecdotally, my employer's group health plan costs ~$650/month for just me. A roughly equivalent plan on the NY exchange is ~$750~900/month (my insurer doesn't participate in the NY exchange and also my employer customized my health plan so there's no direct comparison either way). So there's definitely some savings present.

Oh it looks insane to Americans too.

In the future, you should just look into temporary insurance. Almost every insurer offers temporary plans that you can buy for 1-6 months of coverage to handle a gap between jobs. Unless you have some reason to keep your COBRA coverage (e.g. regular appointments for a chronic condition), the temp insurance acts as good emergency coverage and for very small amounts (last time I did it, ~$250 total for 3 months coverage)

Yeah, most people don't realize that you have 90 days to elect COBRA retroactively after you leave a job. They'll reimburse all your expenses incurred during that time period under the program as if you'd had it the whole time. Once you pay the premiums, of course.

So you basically get 90 days "free" COBRA, but your deductible is 1, 2 or 3 months premiums.

You say that before you need to find a new job in this environment

I have a feeling engineers who managed to find employment at AirBnB in the first place will turn out just fine. It's not exactly your local no-name web dev company.

A lot of big tech companies continue to hire, AirBnB was at the rough intersection of discretionary leisure travel, the gig economy, COVID and tech. aka "the big oof"

"Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA"

That just means that it is available to you -- not that they are going to subsidize it.

They will "cover" 12 months of COBRA, which I take to mean they'll pay the premiums:

> In the midst of a global health crisis of unknown duration, we want to limit the burden of healthcare costs. In the US, we will cover 12 months of health insurance through COBRA. In all other countries, we will cover health insurance costs through the end of 2020. This is because we’re either legally unable to continue coverage, or our current plans will not allow for an extension. We will also provide four months of mental health support through KonTerra.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/05/airbnb-to-lay-off-nearly-190...

Anyone who loses health insurance due to losing their employment (even if they voluntarily resign) is legally allowed to buy COBRA for 18 months. I think they are paying for it, otherwise this would be a fairly meaningless statement since the employer isn't involved with COBRA at all and that's less eligibility than any employee would have.

Many times employers will make statements like this for better PR (always leaving out that they were required to)

In this case, they would have stated 18 months.

I mean, if they're paying 4 months salary, and healthcare optional, they'd probably just pay 3.5 months salary and offer healthcare.

Can you name a single time this has happened?

Something like that happened to me. I was a grad student until the project I was working on ran out of funding. Their website said if you left the program you could pay for health insurance out of pocket under the same plan you had while a student.

What they left out was that the company could reject you as a customer if you had a pre-existing condition. (This was before the ACA took effect.) They can legally do this because COBRA does not apply to grad students.

Fortunately, Oregon at the time had a state-subsidized health insurance plan called OMIP for people that were rejected by private health plans. The premiums weren't cheap, but they weren't worse than equivalent plans. Eventually OMIP was superceded by the ACA marketplace.

I worked for a company that was sold for scraps and they laid off all but there people. It didn’t affect me, I got a contract the next week with one of our clients that I worked with and paid for Cobra.

However, my Cobra eligibility died when the acquiring company cancelled their health care and moved everything to India.

Almost literally every company that had to make changes in compliance with COVID-19 health and safety guidelines.

So that’s a no on the example?

Agreed, it definitely sounds like they are paying for it

Do you realise you have to find a new job within those four months?! It's not 'time off', it's time desperately searching for a new job until you start eating into your savings and your children end up starving.

Air BnB employees in California will be eligible for $4200/mo in unemployment insurance, so compound the two together and that is a lot of dough.

Comparatively I got 0 severance from my small company but am grateful for the unemployment insurance.

What is the median salary of people who were laid off?

It is some how hard to believe that they will start starving within a year after a layoff (perhaps if they plan to maintain their expense levels unchanged, but still sounds very improbable)

What are the calculation that lead you to this conclusion ?

Not everyone manages to negotiate the same high tech salaries even if it looks like they're working for a prestigious company It may take a very long to find new work. People have mortgages that they may struggle to afford long term - or at all if they can't find a job with the same salary, meaning they could have to sell their homes. Some people have debts for whatever reason out of their control. Some people have many family members depending on them. Not everyone's got a simple life.

My wife was part of this layoff, worked in their HR org and we just bought a house beginning of the year borrowing heavily from our 401(k)s. So we immediately now have to payoff this huge loan back to her 401(k) which we were paying per paycheck. 90%+ of her team were let go, so she's competing with all of them for the few roles available in other companies. Most of those 1900 people were not developers, so the next few months will have a lot of uncertainty for us. "Not everyone's got a simple life."

that's true. Not everyone.

Even people who are employed can go broke, declare bankruptcy, and not being able to pay for their previously-enjoyed lifestyle anymore.

The financial security ladder has many steps.

Hard to imagine that programmers, product managers, SREs that had successfully passed AirBnB interviews would be so close to the bottom of that ladder, that their children will go hungry within months of stopping to receive the severance.

Something that scares me is that tech interviews are so fickle. You could pass the Google interview one day but be rejected by everywhere else the next.

Yeah, passed Apple interview but didn't pass FB one :)

The US provides food aid to people with low or no income.

"Eating into savings" is what saving are made for.

There are many caveats to your first statement. For example food aid (SNAP) may be time limited. The federal govt is concerned that you may be deterred for getting a job.

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