It hurts to be poor. Not like hurts when you look at your bank account. Physically hurts. A recent study asked about 4,000 people to keep a diary in which they reported the level of physical pain they were feeling at randomly chosen 15-minute intervals. They found that people in households making under $30,000 a year reported moderate-to-severe pain 20 percent of the time, while those in homes making over $100,000 only ached 8 percent of the time. There are a couple reasons for this. The first is that poorer households do more manual labor and suffer more physical injuries. The second is that folks with intense pain find it harder to work, and thus become poorer. The third is that folks with less money have less insurance and thus less in the way of pain management and mitigation options. Anyway, not much that's a shocker here, but in case you were looking for another reason to be rich rather than poor, there it is.
