By early March 2026, the open enrollment window for Washington State’s health insurance exchange had just closed — and Claudette Kowalski had missed it by eleven days. When I sat down with her at a corner table inside her Spokane barbershop on a Tuesday afternoon, the silence between customers gave her story room to breathe.
I first heard about Claudette from Marcus Diallo, a branch manager at Numerica Credit Union’s South Hill location. He called me in late February after Claudette had come in asking about hardship deferral options on a small business line of credit. “She wasn’t in crisis the way most people who ask that question are,” Marcus told me. “She was just doing math that didn’t work anymore.”
The Year Two Costs Hit at Once
Claudette Kowalski is 27, sharp-eyed, and fast with scissors. She opened Baseline Cuts — her six-chair shop on East 29th Avenue — in September 2022, and by last year she was clearing roughly $81,000 annually after paying her two employees. That number would sound comfortable to most people, and for a while it was.
Then January 2026 arrived with two pieces of mail she hadn’t expected to open on the same morning.
The first was her landlord’s lease renewal notice. The second was her health insurance carrier’s annual rate adjustment. Her commercial rent, which had been $2,150 a month since she signed, jumped to $2,795 — a 30% increase the landlord attributed to “market alignment” along the East 29th corridor. Her family health insurance premium, a plan she’d purchased through Washington Healthplanfinder for herself, her husband Derek, and their three children, climbed from $674 a month to $1,381.
That’s $1,352 more per month — $16,224 more per year — before she changed a single spending habit. “I didn’t overspend. I didn’t make a bad decision,” she told me, her tone more baffled than angry. “I just woke up in January and was a completely different financial situation.”
What a High Earner Can and Cannot Access
Claudette’s instinct was to assume she didn’t qualify for anything. Small business owner. Married. Three kids. Gross household income above $80,000. In her mind, those facts formed a wall between her and any kind of public assistance — and for some programs, she was right.
SNAP benefits for a household of five in Washington State phase out well below her income level. According to USDA’s SNAP eligibility guidelines, the gross monthly income limit for a five-person household sits at approximately $4,167 — a threshold Claudette’s household exceeded. That door was closed.
But the picture on Medicaid was more nuanced than she’d assumed. Washington State’s Apple Health program — the state’s Medicaid expansion under the ACA — covers children in households up to 312% of the federal poverty level. For a family of five in 2026, that ceiling is roughly $102,000 in annual income. Claudette’s three children, two of them Derek’s from his first marriage, were potentially eligible even though she and Derek were not.
When a navigator at the Washington Healthplanfinder office walked Claudette through this in early February, she sat back in her chair and said nothing for a moment. “I felt embarrassed that I didn’t know that,” she told me. “Like I should have figured that out myself. But nobody tells you. You just assume you make too much and that’s the end of it.”
The Blended Family Complication
Claudette’s family structure — she and Derek each brought children into the marriage — added a layer of paperwork that slowed the Medicaid application down by three weeks. The two children from Derek’s previous relationship required documentation of custodial status, the prior household’s income, and confirmation that those children weren’t already enrolled in coverage through their biological mother’s plan.
They were not. Both had aged off a prior plan in 2025.
That tension — between her self-image as someone who handles her own problems and the reality of what the costs were doing to her budget — came up several times during our conversation. Claudette is the kind of person who deflects when asked how she’s doing and pivots immediately to her kids, her husband, her employees. She mentioned twice that she was worried about her stylist Rayna, who works part-time and has no coverage of her own. Her own situation was almost an afterthought.
According to Washington State’s Health Care Authority, Apple Health applications for children can be submitted year-round — there is no enrollment window restriction the way there is for marketplace plans. That distinction mattered enormously for Claudette, given that she had already missed the exchange’s open enrollment cutoff.
What Changed and What Didn’t
By March 10, 2026, all three children were approved for Apple Health coverage. The monthly premium savings on the children’s portion of her old plan came to approximately $510 — meaningful, but not the full reversal she’d hoped for. She and Derek remained on the marketplace plan, now carrying the adult-only premium of roughly $871 per month after the children came off.
The rent situation had no comparable resolution. Washington State does not have a rent stabilization law covering commercial properties, and Claudette’s lease — which she’d signed in 2022 without a cap on renewal increases — gave her landlord full discretion. She negotiated a six-month delay on the new rate, pushing the full $2,795 figure to July 2026, but acknowledged it was a postponement, not a solution.
“The kids being covered, that’s real,” she told me. “That matters every single day. But I’m still looking at a number every month that doesn’t close. I just have a little more breathing room to figure it out.”
The Harder Question She’s Still Sitting With
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Claudette whether she regretted not looking into Apple Health sooner — before the premium spike forced the issue. She was quiet for a beat longer than usual.
“Probably,” she said. “But I think I had this idea that asking for help meant I’d built something that wasn’t real. Like the shop wasn’t actually working.” She gestured toward the chairs, the framed licenses on the wall, the tip jar at the front counter. “But the shop is real. I just ran into a system that doesn’t care how hard you worked to get somewhere.”
What struck me most, leaving Baseline Cuts that afternoon, was not the dollar figures — though they were stark — but the gap between how Claudette presented to the world and what she was actually carrying. A thriving small business, a blended family she clearly poured herself into, and a persistent reluctance to frame her own financial squeeze as something worth addressing. She came to the credit union for help and walked away with something she hadn’t known to ask for.
That gap — between what people assume they qualify for and what they actually do — is where a lot of families quietly absorb costs they don’t have to. Claudette’s situation is still unresolved in meaningful ways. The rent problem has no clean answer. The adult premiums remain steep. But three kids who weren’t covered now are, and that happened because a credit union manager picked up the phone.
Related: No Employer Insurance, a Special Needs Child, and a 30% Rent Hike: One Richmond Family’s Fight to Stay Covered
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