Economic Policy Meet the Connectors

[Passages]

Middlemen, our economy’s most shadowy characters, sit in between buyers and sellers and get rich in the process. It can even be a matter of life or death.

by Whitney Curry Wimbish
December 5, 2025

Cole William Schmidtknecht was about to turn 23 last year, when he went to Walgreens on a cold January day in Appleton, Wisconsin, to pick up some medicine. He expected his Advair Diskus inhaler to cost what it always had under his prescription drug plan, between $35 and $66.86. But when he got to the counter that day, the pharmacist told him insurance no longer covered it and that there was no alternative, though the lawsuit his parents brought showed a generic version should have been covered. His options were to pay $539.19, a 700 percent increase, or leave. So he left.

For the next 120 hours, Cole suffered slow, constant torture. He repeatedly struggled to draw breath. He tried to use an outdated “rescue” inhaler. It didn’t work. He texted his dad Bil, a fellow asthmatic, saying he couldn’t breathe. He began to asphyxiate. By the time his roommate drove him to the emergency room, Cole was “unconscious, pulseless, and appeared blue.” Medical staff gave him two rounds of adrenaline and performed two rounds of CPR, a four-minute race against time to wake him up. They lost.

Cole remained unconscious, his throat so constricted that workers strained to intubate him, his brain starved of oxygen. For six days, he lingered on a ventilator in the intensive care unit “until doctors finally informed his parents … that he was beyond help.” Cole was pronounced dead 11 days after his trip to Walgreens. The immediate cause of death: asthma.

“Cole was forced to choose between his medication and his rent. He chose to pay his rent,” Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) told Congress almost a year later.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/05/meet-the-connectors-middlemen/


Who forced him is deeply shameful.