A young man tragically lost his life after being unable to afford his life-saving inhaler.
Cole Schmidtknecht, a 22-year-old who had struggled with chronic asthma since childhood, was turned away from getting his inhaler after an unexpected price hike.
When he went to pick up his prescription at a Walgreens in Appleton, Wisconsin, on January 10, 2024, he was met with shocking news.
The pharmacist informed him that his usual medication, which had cost $66.86, would now require him to pay a staggering $539.19.
This drastic change was due to a policy adjustment by OptumRx in the fall of 2023, which led Walgreens to stop covering his usual prescription under insurance.
Unable to afford the new price, Cole had no choice but to leave the pharmacy empty-handed.
For five agonizing days, he fought to breathe, relying only on an old emergency inhaler that offered limited relief.
On January 15, 2024, his fight came to a devastating end. He suffered a severe asthma attack that he could not recover from.
When emergency responders arrived, they found Cole unconscious and turning blue.
Despite all efforts to save him, doctors were unable to revive him.
On January 21, his family faced the heartbreaking decision to withdraw life support after doctors confirmed there was no hope of recovery.
Now, his grieving loved ones are pursuing justice, filing a lawsuit against OptumRx, Walgreens, and Walgreens Boots Alliance.
The lawsuit claims negligence and wrongful death, pointing to failures in the system that left Cole without access to his life-saving medication.
One key argument is that Cole was not properly informed about the insurance change, which is a direct violation of Wisconsin’s law requiring 30 days’ notice for coverage changes.
According to the lawsuit obtained by Newsweek, the pharmacist at Walgreens should have reached out to Cole’s doctor for alternative treatment options, but failed to do so.
The lawsuit states that the pharmacist “never provided Cole with any more affordable workarounds to obtain his usual inhaler for his chronic asthma,”
As a result, Cole “repeatedly struggled to breathe, relying only on his old ‘rescue’ (emergency) inhaler to manage his symptoms, as he lacked a preventative inhaler for daily use.”
The case will be overseen by U.S. District Judge Byron Browning Conway, a Biden appointee, according to Law & Crime.
This tragedy follows a shocking case in New York just months ago, where Luigi Mangione, an Ivy League graduate, was accused of murdering Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in what prosecutors describe as a targeted attack on the insurance industry.
Earlier this month, a scathing report exposed how UnitedHealth Group had been overcharging cancer patients by more than 1,000% for essential medications.
The Federal Trade Commission’s findings also implicated major companies like CVS and Cigna in similar price-gouging schemes, all while UHG continues to report record-breaking profits.
Despite the controversy surrounding Thompson’s death, UHG’s net income still surged to $5.54 billion in the final quarter of 2024.
While Thompson’s assassination made headlines and briefly impacted UnitedHealthcare’s stock, its parent company, UnitedHealth Group, has since rebounded.
The FTC report revealed that the largest pharmacy benefit managers—companies responsible for managing prescription drug benefits for insurance providers—raked in an extra $7.3 billion over five years through inflated drug prices.
The report specifically named OptumRx (a subsidiary of UHG), Cigna’s Express Scripts, and CVS Caremark as major contributors to the problem.
“The Big 3 PBMs marked up numerous specialty generic drugs dispensed at their affiliated pharmacies by thousands of percent, and many others by hundreds of percent,” the report stated.
