Carry Smith: Doing Everything Right and Still Losing Coverage

Carry Smith, a 42-year-old from the Savannah area of Georgia, spent years as a competitive distance runner. While she has lost count of how many races she’s competed in, her mom will tell you she ran 17 full marathons and 10 half marathons, plus countless 5Ks and 3Ks. She was a voter advocate, a community organizer, and a student pursuing a PhD. Then, a car accident changed everything.

The crash broke her back in 17 places. What followed were multiple surgeries, two bouts of staph infection requiring a PICC line, a hole in her back for six months, and a surgery just over a year ago to clear the remaining infection — an infection she says she “will be fighting for the rest of my life.”

Today, Carry takes two antibiotics every day and sees a roster of specialists who she describes as a kind of extended family. “Your therapist, your neurologist, your infectious disease [doctor], all these people are like family,” she said, remarking on how her doctors know her intimately after everything they have been through together.

The neurological damage from the accident has permanent consequences. Each evening, Carry reaches a breaking point where her brain is no longer connecting to her spine the way it needs to. When this happens, she loses her center of balance, describing it as an out-of-body experience. At a recent event for a nonprofit she serves, she required a cane and had to get help just walking to her car. “People think that I have full autonomy and capacity to push my body in the same way,” she said. “And I can’t.”

Keeping her recovery on track has not come easy or cheap. Her monthly premium rose from about $46 to more than $330 after enhanced ACA subsidies expired at the end of 2025. That’s more than her car payment. To cover the difference, Carry works seven days a week. At one point she was working five jobs before scaling back. “I was basically working like two or three extra gigs, weekend part-time jobs, to equal the amount of the money that I needed,” she shared.

Then, in August, that coverage disappeared without warning. Carry discovered it by accident, when she noticed a returned payment in her bank account. “I called Anthem, and Anthem informed me that I had to call Georgia Access, that my insurance has been canceled,” she said. “[They] didn’t give me a reason, I didn’t receive an email, I didn’t receive anything.” She had previously been on CVS Aetna before enrolling in the new abruptly canceled Anthem Bronze plan. “I’ve been discontinued from the marketplace,” she said. The cancellation came even though she had kept up with her payments.

The news frightened her. “I was scared. Tears came to my eyes. I called my mom. I’m not a big crier,” she said. She is trying to hold onto some hope, looking towards open enrollment in January. “The bright side is the year’s coming to a close, and it will be here quicker than we know it, and I can get re-enrolled,” she said. Still, she is blunt about what losing coverage without explanation says about the system. “We are in August… [but] we Americans are getting trapped inside these two political spheres and the politics are really creating a humanitarian crisis,” she said. “If folks like myself are willing to pay for what we’ve signed up for and we’ve paid our premiums, there’s absolutely no reason that those premiums need to be delivered back to our bank accounts. We would rather have the coverage.”

Asked whether any upcoming care would be affected by the cancellation, Carry said her routine visits were already behind her — she’d seen her gynecologist and infectious disease doctor back in January. It’s the unexpected that worries her now. “I’d just have to go to the ER,” she said.

Despite the setback, Carry has not stopped showing up for her community or for herself. While out doing voter registration recently, she found herself dancing in the middle of a crowd — a moment that went viral. “A year ago, I wouldn’t be able to move like that,” she said. “It’s the little things, right? Just being able to walk down the street. We’re not talking like I’m out here trying to be a heavy weightlifter or a boxer. We’re just talking about just being able to live and work and take care of myself.”

Her message to policymakers is direct. She wants more people covered, not fewer, and she wants Georgia Access expanded, not restricted. “We need more people to participate and we need more people to do research to find out why we need to expand Georgia access rather than limit putting limitations on it,” she said. “I’m gonna tell you what I tell my policymaker … We’re working real hard, but y’all are making it real hard for us to keep covered. And you’re telling us that we’re not hardworking, or we were not doing enough, but like, homie, I was working five jobs, and I had to drop down to two so I can have a decent quality of living, and I was making this work, but they still cut my insurance.” She added, “Americans deserve the quality of life that we work so hard for.”