I Finally Make Enough Money to Put Away Savings — But Then My Healthcare Was Taken Away

What do you even say at this point?

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

Before August 2021, I never made more than eleven dollars an hour for the part-time work I did. I worked at a college for four years and barely capped in at nine dollars an hour for the duration of my time there. Fifteen dollars, the much-lauded number for the “dream” minimum wage in the United States, seemed like a mighty amount of money to me.

Then I got my most recent job, another part-time gig, where I clock in 25 hours a week at fifteen dollars an hour. It’s just a job that’s supposed to keep me afloat while I take classes for my master’s degree. You could tell me, “Well, Jillian, you have your bachelor’s degree, so why don’t you have a full-time job?” I finished my bachelor’s degree in December 2020, and — after clawing through the job market with three hundred applications — I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere. That’s why the new job seemed perfect: I would work, I would use my free time to try and get a higher degree that might open some doorways, and I’d (finally) have a bit more money to put away for savings.

Or that’s the way it was supposed to go.

It turns out that I now make too much money to qualify for Medicaid in my state. Given that I have a…