The waiting room at a Tucson urgent care clinic is not where most fathers want to spend a Tuesday evening. But in September 2024, Cedric Uribe sat there for nearly four hours, watching a nurse wrap his eleven-year-old son’s sprained wrist, running the math in his head the entire time. By the time they left, the bill was $1,420 — and Cedric had no insurance to soften it.
I first heard about Cedric through Maria Delgado, a financial counselor at a Tucson nonprofit who told me his story needed to be told. “He’s the kind of person who falls through every crack,” she said. “Too much income for some programs, too little for others, and too proud to ask for help until things got bad.” When I sat down with Cedric Uribe at a corner booth of a diner on East Speedway in January 2026, he ordered black coffee and apologized for being five minutes late — he’d come straight from a morning service call.
A Job That Paid the Bills but Left the Family Exposed
Cedric has worked in pest control for fourteen years. He is good at it. His route covers residential neighborhoods across southern Tucson, and in a strong month — spring and summer, when scorpion season drives up call volume — he can bring home close to $3,400. But November through February, that number can drop to $1,900. His annual income for 2024 landed around $29,700, though he told me it had been as high as $36,000 two years prior.
His employer, a regional pest control company, does not offer health insurance to field technicians. Cedric looked into purchasing a private plan on the Healthcare.gov marketplace in 2023, but the lowest-cost plan he found for his family of five — himself, his wife Renata, and their three children aged 8, 11, and 14 — ran $718 per month before subsidies. After subsidies, it dropped to roughly $290, but the deductible was $6,500 per person.
“I looked at that deductible and thought, what’s even the point,” Cedric told me. “If I’m paying $290 a month and I still have to come up with $6,500 before anything’s covered, I’d rather just take the risk.” He let the marketplace plan lapse in January 2024. For the next eighteen months, the family had nothing.
The Months Without Coverage — and What They Cost
Going uninsured is rarely a single catastrophic decision. For most families, it’s a slow accumulation of deferred care and small emergencies. Cedric described the math he ran every time one of his kids got sick: urgent care visit, roughly $150 to $250 out of pocket. A round of antibiotics, another $40 to $80 at the pharmacy. His youngest daughter’s asthma inhaler, $190 without insurance. Over an eight-month stretch in 2024, Cedric estimated the family spent approximately $2,100 on out-of-pocket medical costs — not counting the $1,420 wrist injury in September.
What Cedric did not know — and what took months for anyone to tell him clearly — was that his family likely qualified for AHCCCS, Arizona’s Medicaid program, for most of that period. Arizona expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and the income threshold for a family of five sits well above what Cedric was bringing home in his slower months. His children may have also qualified for KidsCare, Arizona’s CHIP program, regardless of his income fluctuations.
“Nobody at the urgent care said anything,” Cedric told me, a note of frustration entering his voice. “Nobody asked if we had coverage or if we’d looked into programs. I didn’t know to ask either. I just assumed we made too much, or that Medicaid was for people who weren’t working.”
The Application That Went Sideways
In October 2024, three weeks after the urgent care bill arrived, Cedric sat down at his kitchen table and started an AHCCCS application online. He got about halfway through before hitting a wall: the income verification section.
Irregular income is one of the most common stumbling blocks in Medicaid applications. According to Medicaid.gov, eligibility is generally based on current monthly income projected forward — but for self-employed workers or those with variable pay, determining that number requires documentation that doesn’t always fit neatly into an online form. Cedric’s pay stubs varied by $400 to $900 from month to month depending on the season.
“I put in what I made that month, which was a high month — $3,100,” Cedric said. “And then I got a letter a few weeks later saying I didn’t qualify. I just figured that was it.” He did not appeal. He did not reapply. He set the letter aside and went back to paying cash at urgent care visits.
It was Maria Delgado, the financial counselor, who eventually sat down with him in December 2024 and walked through what had happened. His October application had been assessed using a single high-income month rather than an annualized figure. His family, she told him, almost certainly qualified.
The Navigator Who Turned It Around
In January 2025, Cedric was connected with a certified application counselor — an enrollment navigator funded through a federally-supported outreach program — named Tomas Arriaga, who worked out of a community health center on the south side of Tucson. When I spoke with Cedric about those sessions, his tone shifted. He became more deliberate, more precise.
Arriaga helped Cedric calculate an annualized income figure using twelve months of pay stubs — a method that reflected his actual earnings rather than a peak-month snapshot. They documented Renata’s status as a non-earning household member and listed all three children as dependents. The reapplication was submitted in late January 2025.
The approval came in February 2025 — four weeks after resubmission. All five family members were enrolled in AHCCCS. Cedric’s three children were also enrolled in KidsCare, Arizona’s CHIP program, which provided dental and vision coverage that standard AHCCCS adult plans do not include.
What the Coverage Has Meant — and What Cedric Wishes He Had Known
By the time I met with Cedric in January 2026, his family had been enrolled in AHCCCS for nearly eleven months. His youngest daughter’s asthma was being managed with a regularly prescribed inhaler — no more $190 cash payments. His son had seen an orthopedic specialist for a follow-up on that sprained wrist. Renata had gone to a primary care appointment for the first time in three years.
“It sounds small when I say it out loud,” Cedric told me. “But Renata had a headache that had been going on for weeks, and we kept putting it off because we didn’t want to pay for it. She finally went in February. Turns out it was a blood pressure issue — manageable, treatable. But we’d been ignoring it for months.” He paused. “That one’s hard to sit with.”
Cedric estimated that between January and December 2025, his family’s out-of-pocket medical costs dropped from approximately $3,500 annually to under $200 — mostly small copays for specialist visits. His daughter’s inhaler is now covered entirely. The children each had dental cleanings for the first time in over two years.
What he regrets most is the gap — the eighteen months his family went without coverage that they qualified for. According to Healthcare.gov, Medicaid enrollment is available year-round with no open enrollment period, meaning there was no technical barrier to applying earlier. The barrier, for Cedric, was informational.
- He assumed his income was too high based on strong months, not annual averages.
- He believed Medicaid was only for non-working families.
- After his first denial, he had no guidance on how to appeal or reapply.
- No one at the urgent care or pharmacy flagged that he might qualify for coverage.
Each of these assumptions, he told me, felt completely reasonable at the time — and each was wrong.
Sitting across from Cedric as he finished his coffee, I was struck by how much energy he had spent managing a problem that, ultimately, cost him almost nothing to fix once he had the right help. The system worked — eventually. But the distance between “eventually” and “immediately” had cost his family thousands of dollars and months of deferred care.
“I tell everybody now,” he said, sliding on his jacket and picking up his phone for the next service call. “Anybody who’s working a job like mine — no benefits, not sure what you make month to month — just apply. Worst they can say is no. And even then, ask why.”
It is not guidance I can give him back. But it is the most honest thing he said all morning.
Related: She Earned Too Much to Ask for Help — Then Her Rent Jumped 30% and Everything Changed
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