“I was absolutely stunned,” Smith’s mother, Nicole Smith-Holt, 47, tells PEOPLE. “I would’ve never predicted that that’s what would have taken his life.”
Now, Smith-Holt is fighting to make sure this doesn’t happen again to people in need of the life-saving medication, and she’s starting by sharing her son’s story.
As Smith neared his 26th birthday, they knew he would need a new health care plan. He was a manager at a local restaurant in their hometown of Richfield, Minn., which meant his salary was too high to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough where he could always afford his insulin.
“We were forced to go to the marketplace to look for private insurance,” Smith-Holt explains. “What we were coming up with was a huge range of prices, but when we were looking at something that would let him see his same physicians and his same endocrinologist, that plan was running about $450 a month, with a $7,600 deductible.”
“I thought it was absolutely ridiculous, I don’t know how anybody affords it,” she adds. “For a single person to reach that $7,600 deductible — if they didn’t have a chronic illness they’d never hit that. They’d be constantly paying 100 percent. It’s like not having insurance at all.”
They decided that it wasn’t worth paying the $450 a month for insurance, only to then pay the $1,300 or so for his insulin supplies each month until he hit the deductible.
“He decided that he would just hold off on purchasing the insurance and pay out of pocket for his insulin supplies while he searched for a new job, a better job, hopefully with benefits so he would have employer-paid health insurance.” Smith-Holt says.
But unbeknownst to his friends or family, Smith couldn’t afford even a month of his insulin, and decided to start rationing out his injections.
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