You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.
See, you expected it to cost $20, but instead it's $170 or $500 or $1,000.
And you're like, what do we do?
What am I supposed to do?
Dan Weissman is the host of the podcast An Arm and a Leg.
It's a podcast about why health care costs so freaking much and what we can maybe do about it.
Earlier this year,
Dan heard a story from Wisconsin about a young guy named Cole Schmittnacht who had asthma and showed up at his pharmacy one day to get the inhaler that he used to just kind of maintain.
And he'd been using it for years.
And they were like, okay, that's $500, which he was not expecting.
I think he was expecting to pay something like $70.
And he just walked away.
Like he had no idea what to do.
And within a couple of weeks, he had a big asthma attack and he died.
His parents filed a lawsuit against the pharmacy and the pharmacy benefits company.
Because they were like, somebody should have told him that like this specific medicine,
the deal had changed under his insurance and it was no longer covered.
It was going to be $500.
But there's essentially an equivalent inhaler we could have walked out with for a price that would not have shocked him.
And had somebody told him that, he would be alive today.