The free tax preparation clinic on Chicago’s North Side was winding down for the afternoon when I noticed a woman at the end of the table who hadn’t moved in nearly twenty minutes. She was staring at a printout, running her finger down a column of numbers the way you do when you keep hoping the total will change. It didn’t. That was Glenda Pruitt, and after the volunteer beside her stepped away, I introduced myself.
Glenda is 62 years old, has worked as a pharmacy technician for fourteen years, and pays child support for her two teenage kids following a divorce in 2021. She lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in the Avondale neighborhood, and she is, by most measures, a careful person. She budgets. She saves. She does not ask her family for money. None of that prepared her for what happened when her insurance premium nearly doubled in January 2026.
When the Premium Letter Arrived in November
Glenda’s employer, an independent pharmacy, does not offer group health coverage. She has purchased her own marketplace plan through the Healthcare.gov exchange for the past three years. Through 2025, her monthly premium sat at $431 — not comfortable, but manageable against a take-home income of roughly $3,200 per month after taxes and her $610 child support obligation.
Then the renewal notice came. Her 2026 premium: $847 per month for a comparable silver-tier plan. The enhanced premium tax credits introduced under the American Rescue Plan had been extended through 2025, but a reduction in her subsidy eligibility — triggered partly by a 4.1 percent raise she received in mid-2025 — pushed her into a higher cost bracket. The number on the page was not a typo.
“I sat with that letter for probably two hours,” Glenda told me, folding her hands on the table between us. “I kept thinking, I did everything right. I got the raise. I paid my bills. And now the raise is what’s hurting me.”
After the premium increase, her fixed monthly obligations — rent at $1,190, child support at $610, the new insurance premium, utilities, and a car note — consumed nearly every dollar she brought home. She was left with roughly $140 per month for groceries, clothing, and any unexpected expense.
The Cosigned Loan That Came Back
Three months before the premium letter arrived, Glenda had received a different kind of notice. In August 2025, a collections agency informed her that her ex-brother-in-law had defaulted on an $18,500 auto loan she had cosigned in 2022, when he was rebuilding his credit after a layoff. He stopped making payments in May 2025. By the time Glenda found out, four months of payments had been missed and the car had already been repossessed and sold at auction — leaving a deficiency balance of $11,340 now assigned to her.
Glenda did not tell her adult siblings what happened. She did not call her ex-husband. She quietly began paying $215 per month toward the collections balance on top of everything else. When I asked her why she hadn’t sought help from family, she paused for a long moment before answering.
The Question She Kept Avoiding: Should She Claim Social Security at 62
Glenda became eligible to file for Social Security retirement benefits on her 62nd birthday in February 2026. She knew this. She had, she told me, been googling it since October. But the decision had been sitting on her mental shelf, unresolved, because she understood — intuitively, if not precisely — that claiming early meant a permanent reduction in her monthly benefit.
According to Social Security Administration guidance, filing at 62 rather than full retirement age — which is 67 for people born after 1960 — results in a reduction of up to 30 percent of the primary insurance amount. For Glenda, whose SSA statement projected a monthly benefit of approximately $1,480 at full retirement age, claiming now would drop that figure to roughly $1,036 per month.
“I know it’s less money. I know that,” she said. “But I’m looking at my bank account right now, and I’m also thinking — what if I get sick before I’m 65 and I have to stop working? At least I’d have something coming in.”
That fear — of a health crisis before Medicare eligibility — is not unfounded. The gap years between a worker’s late fifties or early sixties and Medicare’s standard eligibility age of 65 represent one of the most financially precarious stretches in an uninsured or underinsured worker’s life. A 2024 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that adults ages 55 to 64 without employer-sponsored coverage face the highest average individual market premiums of any non-elderly age group.
What Glenda Learned at the Tax Clinic
The volunteer tax preparer who sat with Glenda that afternoon did two things that surprised her. First, he recalculated her projected 2026 income more carefully, accounting for a reduction in overtime she had taken in January due to a wrist injury. The revised income figure — approximately $51,200 annually — placed her closer to the subsidy threshold than her employer’s payroll estimate had suggested.
Second, he walked her through the process of updating her marketplace application to reflect that corrected income projection, which could reduce her monthly premium by roughly $190 if approved. It was not the $416 drop she needed, but it was something.
Glenda had not filed for Social Security the day we spoke. She had not ruled it out either. The decision sat exactly where she had left it — unresolved, complicated, and heavier than it looked from the outside.
The Uncomfortable Arithmetic of Waiting
As Glenda and I packed up our papers, she did something I didn’t expect. She pulled out a notepad — actual paper, not a phone — and showed me two columns of numbers she had worked out herself. On the left was her monthly budget if she claimed Social Security now and kept working. On the right was her projected situation at 65 when Medicare would replace her $847 premium with the standard Medicare Part B premium, which Medicare.gov lists at $185 per month in 2026 for most enrollees.
The difference in that bottom row — $140 now versus roughly $1,015 at 65 — was what Glenda was living inside. Three years felt very long when her margin was that thin. “I’m not bad at math,” she said quietly, sliding the notepad back into her bag. “I just don’t like what the math is telling me.”
What struck me most about Glenda wasn’t desperation. She was composed and precise, answering every question with specifics she had clearly thought about before. What struck me was the combination of things closing in on her at once — the premium increase, the loan default, the early-filing decision — none of which she had caused, and all of which had arrived within the same six-month window.
When I left the clinic, Glenda was still at the table, copying notes from the volunteer’s printed handout in her careful, even handwriting. She told me she was going to go home and update her marketplace application that night. The Social Security question, she said, could wait until she had the new premium number in front of her. One thing at a time.
Three years is a long time to wait on a margin of $140 a month. Whether she makes it to Medicare without claiming early — without something else going wrong — is a question I found myself thinking about on the train ride back. Glenda wasn’t asking for sympathy. She just wanted the numbers to work. So far, they don’t.
Sloane Avery Wren is a Senior Benefits Writer at Benefit Beat covering Social Security and government benefits programs. This article is reported narrative and does not constitute financial, legal, or benefits advice. Readers with questions about their own Social Security or Medicare eligibility are encouraged to contact the SSA directly at 1-800-772-1213 or visit ssa.gov.
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