Medicaid (see my answer below). I was shocked to find out I qualified given my income level in the past year, but since I made no money, it was free for my wife and kids and i had to pay a heavily subsidized rate for marketplace insurance, with no expected pay back now that my income is back to normal. I honestly think that the 'America has no social programs' trope that is often parroted by online personalities does a lot of harm in that it discourages people from applying. I applied originally as a joke to show my very fiscally-conservative mother that it is hard to get on to government welfare programs, but I was shocked at how easy it was.
Yes. So my parents told me about this. But in the past, I paid for COBRA. Huge mistake. This time (as part of the layoffs at the beginning of the year that many engineers faced), my mom told me that Medicaid is freely available, and I'd be stupid to pay for COBRA. She's very conservative and one of those 'look at all these people taking advantage of government program types', so I thought she was making it up at first.
However, I looked it up, and she was right. Plugged in my numbers into healthcae.gov, and I got a call from medicaid the next day. Even though I had made the equivalent of >240k per-annum based just on my January income (was laid off in Jan), I qualified for medicaid for my kids immediately (my wife and I would have qualified in a few months in my state due to how they count income, but in the meantime, qualified for a heavily subsidized rate). Medicaid in my state takes income by the week, so since I made no money in the week, my income was considered zero, so my kids got free medical. Some time later we found out my wife is pregnant, so she was also covered by medicaid.
A few things. Firstly, I explicitly called out to the medicaid guy how much money I was expecting to make (almost 300k), as well as how much savings I had. He told me it didn't matter since I made zero in the past week, and medicaid is by the week. Secondly, I explicitly asked, since I expected to make a shit ton of money this year, if I had to pay it back. He said no. Even if I were to make a million dollars this year or a billion, I would never owe anything for those months we were on medicaid.
Of course, I also qualified for unemployment, but that income put us below the medicaid threshold.
Medicaid was better than our private insurance (which was itself a posh PPO plan). I know this because my youngest daughter ended up in the hospital twice and needed an ambulance ride. The november ride cost us more than a thousand. The medicaid ride was free. All things considered, especially given my new job, we saved a good amount of money being laid off.
At the end of it all, I got a new job in April and the new insurance kicked in in May. It was actually hard to get off medicaid since they didn't really have a way to do that (I guess it's not 'intended' for those making a lot of money with periods of unemployment). We had to struggle to explain to the state we didn't need their money anymore and were insured. They insisted on keeping us insured anyway. I was okay with this but my wife thought we shouldn't squander state funds, so she called regularly and finally got through to someone who would cancel it for us (I had already sent in my income change notification forms, but whatever system they had in place didn't remove me).