Okay, but isn't it possible that poorer people just tend to be less healthy in general? Sure. That's why the researchers also looked at when people go the hospital for appendicitis, which doesn't depend on diet. So there shouldn't be any end-of-the-month increase for low-income people if tight budgets are the problem. There wasn't. As you can see above, appendicitis cases were flat across the month for both high (blue) and low (purple) income people.

In other words, poorer people don't need more care at the end of the month for every kind of condition. Just the ones that get worse when you don't have enough to eat.

We can do better. We could start by paying out welfare, food stamps, and Social Security twice a month, instead of just at the beginning. We could even pay out food stamps as cash instead of benefits, since we know people will trade them at deep discounts to turn them into cash (or, in Appalachia, into quasi-cash like ... soda). These might help people plan a little bit better, and stretch their cash a little bit further, though it wouldn't help their fundamental problem: not having enough money. But, luckily, there's an easy fix for that. It's called giving people money. (And it really works!). That might mean something like increasing the EITC ... if Republicans were willing to increase poverty spending. But they're not. That's why Democrats are talking about hiking the minimum wage instead—it wouldn't cost the government a dime, but would still make a dent in poverty. Indeed, economist Arin Dube shows that while his colleagues can't agree whether or how many jobs a minimum wage increase would cost, they do agree that it would boost incomes at the bottom.

That's spending—or in the minimum wage's case, regulation—that could help pay for itself. Think about it this way: Poverty begets poverty. So anything that stops some of this cycle of bad jobs, bad health, and broken homes could reduce spending on the rest. Or, as Adrianna McIntyre puts it, we can't separate social policy and health policy for low-income households. Maybe giving poorer people more cold, hard cash would let them afford more food at the end of the month—and save the $1,186 that an average hypoglycemia episode costs.

That's a cure we can afford.

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