Have you ever looked at your pay stub and felt like you were doing everything right — steady job, reasonable salary, no frivolous spending — and still found yourself rationing medication you need to function? That question sat with me for days after I first heard Renee Womack’s name.
I met Renee in January 2026, not in a benefits office or a hospital waiting room, but in the front seat of a Meals on Wheels delivery van cutting through Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood. A volunteer coordinator named Deb had pulled me along for a ride-along while I was reporting on food access for older residents. Somewhere between stops, Deb mentioned a young woman — a regular Saturday volunteer — who had quietly been going through her own health coverage crisis. “She never complains,” Deb told me. “But I know she skipped her medication for months.”
That young woman was Renee Womack, 29, a full-time bank teller at a regional credit union in Pittsburgh’s East End. I reached out the following week, and she agreed to meet me at a coffee shop near her apartment in Shadyside, where she rents a room with a roommate to keep costs manageable.
A Good Salary That Didn’t Protect Her
Renee earns approximately $48,000 a year — a solid income for her age, and above the median for her profession. She doesn’t have dependents, she doesn’t carry credit card debt, and she contributes to her credit union’s 401(k) plan. By most measures, she was doing everything right.
But in August 2025, her employer notified staff that the company health plan was switching providers. The new plan looked similar on paper. In practice, it reclassified her levothyroxine — a standard thyroid hormone replacement she has taken since being diagnosed with hypothyroidism at age 24 — from a Tier 1 generic to a Tier 3 specialty drug. Her monthly cost for a 30-day supply jumped from $12 to $94.
“I actually laughed when I saw the new number,” Renee told me. “I thought it was a mistake. Then I called the pharmacy and they said, no, that’s correct. That’s your new cost.”
Renee’s rent — split with a roommate — runs $875 a month. Her car insurance, utilities, student loan payment, and groceries account for most of the rest. A sudden $82-a-month increase was not trivial. She made a decision she now describes with visible discomfort: she stopped filling the prescription.
Three Months Without Treatment
From September through November 2025, Renee went without levothyroxine. Hypothyroidism, left untreated, can cause fatigue, weight gain, cognitive fog, and depression. Renee experienced all of it.
She didn’t tell her manager. She didn’t tell her family in West Virginia. Instead, she kept showing up to her Saturday Meals on Wheels shifts, delivering hot meals to elderly residents who relied on the program for their primary nutrition. The irony — that she was helping others meet basic needs while quietly going without her own medication — is not lost on her.
“I know how that sounds,” she said. “But those people are counting on us. What am I going to do, skip because of a copay?”
The Turning Point: A Conversation at a Delivery Door
In November 2025, Renee was delivering a meal to an 81-year-old woman named Gloria in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Gloria was juggling her own Medicare paperwork — specifically, questions about Part D drug coverage changes for 2026. According to CNBC, the standard Medicare Part B monthly premium was set to jump 9.7% in 2026, and Part D formularies were shifting alongside it.
Renee helped Gloria sort through the paperwork. And while doing so, she started asking questions for herself — about drug pricing, about formularies, about how prescription tiers get assigned. That conversation sent her online that evening.
She found that GoodRx listed her medication for as low as $9 for a 90-day supply at a nearby pharmacy. Her current insurance tier was charging her $94 per month — more than ten times the cash price available through a discount program.
What She Found — and What Still Worries Her
Renee restarted her medication in December 2025. Her physical symptoms began improving within weeks. She now pays approximately $3 per month for a 90-day supply — less than she paid before her plan changed.
But the experience left her shaken in ways that a resolved prescription cost doesn’t fully address. Her employer’s plan still carries a $4,200 individual deductible. She has no dental or vision coverage. And the healthcare cost pressures affecting older Americans are, as she now understands, not entirely separate from the pressures she faces.
As MarketWatch reported, Medicare Part B premiums and prescription drug costs are rising across the board in 2026 — changes that affect the elderly neighbors she serves each Saturday, and that reflect a broader system in which coverage gaps can appear at any income level, at any age.
She told me she plans to review her employer plan options closely during the next open enrollment — something she admits she had always treated as a checkbox before this year.
The Bigger Picture Behind One Person’s Story
Renee’s situation isn’t an anomaly. According to the Detroit Free Press, the nearly 10% hike in Medicare Part B premiums in 2026 is eating into the 2.8% COLA increase that Social Security beneficiaries received — leaving many older Americans with a net gain of just a few dollars per month. The same cost pressures that squeeze retirees are rippling through every tier of the health insurance market.
For Renee, the resolution was real but incomplete. She’s back on her medication. She’s back to feeling like herself. But she carries a specific, hard-earned awareness now — that a single plan change, a single formulary reclassification, can disrupt someone’s health regardless of what they earn.
“I used to think health insurance stress was something that happened to older people or people without jobs,” she told me as we wrapped up. “Now I know it can happen to anybody. It happened to me.”
When I left the coffee shop that afternoon, I thought about Gloria in the Hill District, sorting through Medicare forms at her kitchen table. And I thought about the 29-year-old delivering her lunch every Saturday — both of them navigating a system that requires more than good intentions to survive.
Leave a Reply