Approximately one in four low-income American households skips or rations prescription medication at least once a year because of cost — a figure that feels abstract until you’re standing in a library meeting room in Tampa, Florida, listening to a 34-year-old woman describe counting pills to stretch a 30-day supply into 45. That’s where I met Tanya Holloway on a Tuesday afternoon in October 2025, at a Medicare enrollment assistance event organized by a local nonprofit at the Seminole Heights Branch Library.
She hadn’t come for herself. She’d come with a handwritten list of questions about her mother’s coverage gap. But once the enrollment counselors finished with the other attendees and the folding tables started coming down, Tanya stayed. She sat across from me with her work jacket still on — the logo of a Tampa pest control company stitched above the left breast pocket — and started talking in the flat, unhurried tone of someone who has repeated her situation so many times it no longer surprises her.
A Budget That Doesn’t Add Up, No Matter How Many Times She Runs It
Tanya Holloway brings home approximately $2,100 a month after taxes working full-time as a licensed pest control technician. She has been in the trade for six years, and she’s good at it. The problem, she told me, has never been the work.
She remarried in 2022 and now runs a blended household in Tampa’s University area with her husband Marcus and three children — two from her first marriage, ages 9 and 11, and one from Marcus’s previous relationship, age 7. Marcus works part-time in warehouse logistics after a knee injury limited his hours. Their combined take-home is roughly $3,200 a month.
From that $3,200, the family pays $1,150 in rent, $340 in newly out-of-pocket prescription costs for Tanya’s blood pressure medication and Marcus’s post-surgery anti-inflammatory, roughly $600 in groceries and utilities, and approximately $400 a month that Tanya sends to family members — her mother in Lakeland and a younger sibling in Georgia who has struggled with employment since 2023.
“The math never lands,” she told me, not with frustration but with the resigned clarity of a person who has stopped expecting it to. “I’ve been doing it in my head for two years. It doesn’t land. I just keep moving.”
The Property Tax Problem Nobody Warned Her About
The $1,847 delinquent property tax bill is the weight Tanya mentions last, even though it’s arguably the most urgent. She and Marcus purchased their home in 2021 through a community land trust program, a move that made homeownership possible but came with a learning curve about ongoing costs she says nobody fully walked them through.
When her insurance plan changed employers in early 2025 — her company switched carriers in February — her prescription out-of-pocket costs jumped from roughly $60 a month to $340. That $280 monthly difference, annualized, is the gap that quietly pushed the property tax account into delinquency by spring.
In Florida, delinquent property taxes accrue interest at up to 18 percent annually, and after two years of nonpayment, a tax certificate can be sold to a third-party investor — a process that can eventually lead to foreclosure if left unresolved. Tanya did not know this when she closed the laptop.
What the Library Event Actually Offered Her
The Medicare enrollment event where I met Tanya was hosted by a local Area Agency on Aging affiliate. Its primary purpose was helping older adults navigate Part D prescription drug coverage and the Low Income Subsidy program — commonly called “Extra Help” — which can reduce prescription costs to as little as $0 for qualifying enrollees.
Tanya was there for her mother, but the counselors she spoke with pointed her toward a parallel resource: Florida’s Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and — more directly relevant — the Hillsborough County property tax deferral program available to homeowners who meet income thresholds. She hadn’t heard of either.
When the counselor explained the property tax deferral option, Tanya’s response, as she recounted it to me, was to ask whether it would affect her credit. When told it would not — it attaches as a lien, not a derogatory account — she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Why did nobody tell me that before?”
The Weight of Being the One Who Sends Money Home
The $400 a month Tanya sends to her mother and her sibling is the number she hesitates over longest when I ask about it. She knows, on paper, that it’s unsustainable. She also knows she’s not going to stop.
This pattern — what researchers sometimes call “kin tax” or informal family economic support — is documented across low-income households, particularly in communities where formal safety net access is limited or mistrusted. For Tanya, it means her household is effectively operating on roughly $2,800 a month after family transfers, against expenses that don’t compress.
She hasn’t told Marcus the full picture of what she sends. She described this to me not as deception but as management — her word. “He knows I help them. He doesn’t know the number. I manage it.” There was no drama in how she said it. Just facts.
A Partial Turning Point — and What Remains Unresolved
By the time I followed up with Tanya by phone six weeks after the library event, some things had moved. She had applied for Extra Help through the Social Security Administration on behalf of her mother, a process she described as “easier than I expected, honestly” — completed online at SSA.gov in about 40 minutes. Her mother’s approval, if granted, could reduce her drug costs to as little as $3.95 per generic prescription for 2026.
For her own prescriptions, a hospital social worker she was connected to through a clinic visit helped her identify a patient assistance program through the manufacturer of her blood pressure medication. The application was pending as of our last conversation, but if approved, her cost for that drug alone could drop from roughly $180 a month to zero.
The property tax situation was more complicated. The deferral program’s income threshold — household income at or below $10,000 — did not apply to Tanya and Marcus, whose combined income exceeds it. She did not qualify. What she learned instead was that Hillsborough County offers a payment plan for delinquent taxes, allowing the $1,847 to be spread across installments rather than paid in a lump sum. She had set up the first $462 payment the week we spoke.
She still sends money home. She said she probably always will. The $400 figure had dropped to $320 one month when her brother found a temporary position, but she wasn’t counting on that holding.
When I asked Tanya what she would tell someone in a similar situation — juggling costs that feel unmovable, avoiding the county tax portal, rationing medication — she paused the longest she had paused in our entire conversation. “Go somewhere physical,” she finally said. “Not the internet. Somewhere physical, with a person. Because I found out more in that library in two hours than I’d figured out in two years on my own.”
That’s not a solution. It’s barely a starting point. But for Tanya Holloway, standing in a library in her pest control jacket with a handwritten list of questions about someone else’s insurance, it was the first time in a long time the numbers felt slightly less impossible. For now, that counts.
Scarlett Monroe is a Senior Writer at American Relief covering economic hardship, government benefits, and stimulus programs across the United States.
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