Most people assume that a steady union job with solid wages means you are insulated from the kinds of bureaucratic nightmares that fill government benefits offices. Brittany Stanton believed that too — until an October morning in 2024 on a Miami commercial construction site ended that assumption with a single misplaced step and a badly fractured wrist.
I connected with Brittany in late January 2026, after she responded to a call-for-sources I posted on social media asking to hear from people who had navigated government assistance programs while holding what most would consider a “good” income. Her reply was blunt: “Everyone thinks electricians are set. Nobody talks about what happens when we get hurt.” We met at a coffee shop near her home in Little Havana a week later.
The Injury That Exposed Everything
Brittany had been a licensed journeyman electrician with the IBEW Local 349 in Miami for six years. At the time of her injury, she was pulling in roughly $94,000 a year in base wages — good money by most measures, and she knew it. She was engaged to her partner Daniel, who was finishing a graduate program in environmental engineering, and the two were sharing a two-bedroom rental in Miami’s Brickell area for $2,950 a month.
She also ran a small side operation doing residential electrical work on weekends, which had been generating between $1,800 and $2,200 a month at its peak in 2023. By October 2024, that number had drifted down to closer to $600 a month — a slide she attributed partly to burnout, partly to a saturated market for independent contractors in South Florida.
The injury itself was a displaced fracture of her right scaphoid bone — her dominant hand. Surgery followed within two weeks. Her union’s workers’ compensation coverage kicked in, but under Florida law, workers’ comp replaces only 66.67 percent of an injured worker’s average weekly wage. Her effective workers’ comp benefit came to approximately $4,680 per month.
Between the drop in workers’ comp versus her normal take-home pay and the near-collapse of her side business income, Brittany was looking at a monthly shortfall she put at roughly $2,400. “I kept thinking, I have workers’ comp, I have union benefits, I’m fine,” she told me, stirring her coffee without drinking it. “Then I actually looked at my bank statement for November and I almost threw my phone across the table.”
The Medicaid Question She Was Afraid to Ask
A friend — another trades worker who had gone through a shoulder surgery two years earlier — suggested Brittany look into Florida Medicaid to cover therapy costs and specialist follow-ups that her workers’ comp insurer was contesting. Brittany told me she felt embarrassed even searching the topic online.
What Brittany discovered — after two evenings of research and a call to Florida’s ACCESS helpline — was that Florida’s Medicaid eligibility for adults without dependent children is extremely narrow. According to Medicaid.gov enrollment data, Florida is one of ten states that have not adopted the ACA Medicaid expansion, which means non-disabled, non-pregnant adults without children are effectively ineligible regardless of income. For Brittany to qualify, she would need to meet the state’s definition of disabled — a process that runs through the Social Security Administration and can take, on average, more than a year.
Her workers’ comp insurer, meanwhile, was disputing coverage for two occupational therapy sessions per week that her surgeon had recommended as essential to regaining full hand function. The out-of-pocket cost for those sessions was $180 each, four times a month: $720 she was now paying herself.
Navigating a System That Wasn’t Built for Her Situation
Over the following three months — November 2024 through January 2025 — Brittany made four separate calls to the Florida Department of Children and Families, which administers the state’s Medicaid program. She described the process to me with a kind of tired humor, the way people laugh about things that aren’t really funny.
“Every person I talked to told me something slightly different,” she said. “One told me I’d definitely qualify if I applied through the disability pathway. Another told me not to bother because workers’ comp counts as income and I’d be over the limit anyway. I didn’t know who to believe.”
She eventually connected with a patient advocate at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s social work department, who helped her submit a formal Medicaid application citing her injury-related disability. The application was submitted in December 2024. As of the time we met in late January 2026 — fourteen months later — the case was still in a pending review status with no determination issued.
The Numbers That Kept Adding Up
By the time we met, Brittany had paid approximately $10,800 out of pocket for the occupational therapy sessions her insurer declined to cover — fourteen months at $720 a month, with brief gaps when she simply couldn’t afford it and skipped appointments. Her surgeon has told her that the gaps in therapy may have contributed to a longer-than-expected recovery timeline.
Her side business had effectively shut down. “I can’t swing a wire fish tape with my right hand yet,” she told me matter-of-factly. “There’s no side work.” The business had gone from generating $600 a month at the time of her injury to zero by February 2025. The couple had drawn down approximately $14,000 from savings they had originally set aside for a down payment on a condo.
Brittany returned to light duty work with her union in November 2025 — thirteen months after the injury. She is currently earning approximately 70 percent of her pre-injury rate while on modified assignment, which means her workers’ comp benefit has also been adjusted downward. Her full return to unrestricted electrical work has no confirmed date yet.
According to the Florida Division of Workers’ Compensation, injured workers are entitled to request an Independent Medical Examination if they dispute their insurer’s decisions about medical necessity — a step Brittany said she was not clearly informed about until month nine of her claim.
What She Would Do Differently — and What the System Still Owes Her
Sitting across from Brittany at that coffee shop, I was struck by how pragmatic she was about things that would have unraveled many people. She described her anxiety about bills in the third person almost — acknowledging it existed, then moving past it. But she was also clear-eyed about where the system had failed her.
“If I had known about the patient advocate at Jackson from day one, I would have had that Medicaid application in by November, not December,” she said. “That’s one month. That might not sound like a lot. But in a fourteen-month wait, every month matters.”
She also said she wished someone had explained, early in the process, the difference between the disability pathway to Medicaid and the standard income-based pathway — information she only got from the hospital social worker after multiple dead-end phone calls to the state agency. According to Healthcare.gov’s Medicaid eligibility guidance, people who qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance or Supplemental Security Income may be eligible for Medicaid through a separate pathway, but the process varies significantly by state.
When I asked her what she would tell another union tradesperson facing a similar situation, she paused for a long moment.
As of March 2026, Brittany’s Medicaid application remains unresolved. She has filed a formal request for an expedited review, citing ongoing medical necessity. Her union has assigned a benefits coordinator to follow up on her behalf — a resource she said she did not know existed for the first eight months of her claim. The outcome, she told me, still feels uncertain. But she has stopped avoiding her bank statements.
I left that coffee shop thinking about how many Brittany Stantons there are — people doing everything right by conventional standards, carrying injuries and gaps and unanswered applications, waiting on systems that move at their own pace entirely indifferent to anyone’s savings account. Her story is not a cautionary tale about recklessness. It is a portrait of what falls through even when you have done nearly everything right.
Related: A Denied Workers’ Comp Claim Forced This Miami UPS Driver to Face Her $0 Retirement Savings at 32
Leave a Reply