The Ledger
A Confession in Numbers
Alec Smith was twenty-six years old and three hundred dollars short of his insulin.
He’d been a restaurant manager in Minneapolis, making $35,000 a year—too much to qualify for Medicaid, not enough to cover the $1,300 a month his body required to stay alive. When he aged off his mother’s insurance, he did what people in his position do. He calculated. He rationed. He tried to make it to payday.
On June 27, 2017, his mother got the call no parent survives.
The cause of death was diabetic ketoacidosis—what happens when a body runs out of insulin. The same drug costs about thirty dollars a month in Canada. In the United States, in 2017, it cost Alec Smith his life.
That same year, the Pentagon’s F-35 fighter jet program was tracking toward what the Government Accountability Office now confirms is a two-trillion-dollar lifetime price tag. Each plane runs about $82 million. The program is late, over budget, and the military has been flying the jets less than planned. None of that has slowed the money.
These two facts exist in the same country. The same fiscal year. The same tax base.
