> COBRA costs are a couple thousand dollars for families, and even that’s not available to employees who choose to voluntarily quit. COBRA is available in the

> COBRA costs are a couple thousand dollars for families, and even that’s not available to employees who choose to voluntarily quit. COBRA is available in the US regardless of the reason for quitting a job. I quit a large company job to try launching my own startup and was using COBRA for family health care. It is not cheap, as you say (my top-of-the-line medical+dental+vision coverage for myself, my wife and the kids was ~$2500/month), but the option is certainly there. But I think the main approach to this type of voluntary severance bonus is for people to move to another employer, not to the unemployment. I know a few people who took such offers and they all quickly pre-arranged their next step before signing buyout offers. In fact this is one of the big problems with buyouts at large corps: the people taking buyouts first are good engineers that can find jobs anytime and this is the group the companies want to keep. My 2c.