Here’s a story about how that works.

Photo by Alex Jones on Unsplash (My Edit)

Suppose you’re between jobs, but you just got hired and are about to start a new one. You’re stoked to have a reliable income again, or perhaps for the first time, but there’s a problem. You need a pair of shoes that meet its requirements. Let’s say, for the sake of the story, that you need steel-toed boots. They come in handy in a variety of situations.

You go online or to a local brick-and-mortar store location, and you find an array of options. Prices range from $45 to $4,500, in all manner of materials, styles, sizes, and colors.

Because money is tight, you pick the cheapest ones you can find. They last you a couple of months, if that, because they aren’t of great quality. By that time, maybe you can afford some better ones, if your new job is working out well and pays a decent wage.

The only problem is, many jobs don’t pay a decent wage, and you’ve got other expenses to worry about, too. You buy a second pair, because you know what they cost and what kind of quality to expect. You make minimum wage, so you’re happy to have the job, but it hasn’t improved your situation much.

By now, you can probably understand where this is going. There’s no way I’d counsel someone to spend $4,500 on a pair of shoes, assuming they can’t also perform miracles or give you magical powers. (If miracles or magical powers are involved, it might be worth it.) But if you know that you’ll be using a pair of shoes for a job you’ll have for a long time, you can see how buying a new pair of $45 shoes every couple of months can easily cost you more over time than if you’d splurged for something between $100 and $200 instead.

But that’s not all. What do you think happens when you have a job that requires you to be on your feet a lot, when you have crummy shoes?

Answer: it’s not good for your feet, legs, or back. Eventually, you’ll need to involve a podiatrist, a chiropractor, and who knows what other sorts of specialists. You’ll have pain. Pain will cause you to miss work or not be as effective at work, which could also get you fired if it happens often. And it will happen often, as long as you keep wearing those cheap shoes.

If you make minimum wage, as an hourly employee, your income has a max ceiling. It can also vary a lot from week to week or month to month, and your hours may be cut back without warning. If you’re a full-time employee, you may have insurance benefits, but many places keep people at part-time status to avoid having to offer such benefits.

Walmart did it to me in 2013, which is bizarre on several levels, especially given that they absolutely can afford it.

Let’s say your hours get cut, or let’s say you’re never a full-time employee at all. Now, to make ends meet, you have to get two part-time jobs instead of one full-time job, and neither one of them will give you insurance benefits. In the United States, that means you must:

find insurance through the healthcare marketplace, or

obtain insurance through Medicaid and/or Medicare, or

pay a penalty at tax time, and

pay 100% of medical bills out of pocket

Whatever insurance you can afford and how much government assistance you can get for it will depend on several factors, including what state you live in. When the Affordable Care Act (the ACA, otherwise known as Obamacare) kicked in several years ago, it was up to individual states to expand Medicaid using federal funding. Many states opted out of Medicaid expansion, however, refusing to take the federal funding because it was Obama’s policy.

I’m not kidding. It was extremely fashionable for political candidates to refuse to do anything Obama wanted, even if they agreed with him, because it was Obama. Many readers will remember this, but I know some were too young or just weren’t paying attention.

The point is, if you can get insurance at all, it may be quite expensive or ineffective, or both. If you can’t get insured, now you’ve got to worry about the tax penalty, and those foot, leg, and back problems you got from the cheap shoes? Those are still in play, and that means you need to see some doctors, which you won’t be able to do very much, considering how much you work and how much it actually costs to see doctors.

The stress of working two jobs, having those health problems, and whatever else you’ve got going on in your life? All of them intersect with and intensify each other. Guess where you end up?

The emergency room! Possibly by ambulance after being injured on the job. If you got hurt on the job, your employer will probably make you take a drug test. You’ve been in a lot of pain and under a lot of stress, so you smoke a little weed on your off hours. It doesn’t impact your work and has nothing to do with getting injured. It’s just a way for the employer to bilk you out of any worker’s compensation you might seek.

At this point, you might have lost one job and be on your way to losing the other, since the ER doctors kept you for several hours, resulting in you missing a shift at the second job. Even if you can keep both jobs, how much longer do you really think you can do this?

A short time later, you get a bill from the ER and from the ambulance company. You don’t even bother to read it, knowing you can’t pay. It ends up shoved into a random drawer. You find it again several months later, sigh, and throw it away.

You still have a lot of pain and can’t work the way you used to. The constant stress continues to take its toll, and you’ve all but lost hope of things getting better.