This story is part of our latest Super Issue, which examines how money, burnout and policy are changing the way NKY gets — and gives— medical care. Click here to learn more.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the medicine I get from them,” said Donald Robinson, who turns 85 this month.
The Edgewood resident is on Medicare and receives many of the medicines he needs to live through the Faith Community Pharmacy, located at 601 Washington Ave. in Newport. The pharmacy, founded in 2002 by a few local pharmacists, is part of the Faith Community Health Network. It serves uninsured and underinsured patients and is a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Its income is based on donations, sponsorships and money raised through fundraising events.
As federal policy changes threaten to increase the number of uninsured Kentuckians, Northern Kentucky nonprofits and physicians are expanding free clinics and pharmacy services to fill widening gaps that doctors say could otherwise push more people into emergency rooms with preventable medical crises.
“It’s very easy for people, myself included, sometimes, to say, ‘It doesn’t affect me, I have health insurance, I have steady employment, I have food security, I have housing security,’ all of these things,” said Dr. Holly Danneman, an NKY physician. “Sometimes it’s easier to turn a blind eye, because it’s less uncomfortable. I think that people feel the need to get involved for different reasons. Some get involved because they acknowledge their fortunate lot in life and acknowledge the fact that not everyone is as fortunate as they are.”
Danneman has been a physician in the region for 26 years. She is board-certified in family medicine, but spent the bulk of her career working in the emergency department. She is also an adult hospitalist, caring for adults admitted to the hospital.
Her current role is regional dean for the University of Kentucky College of Medicine–Northern Kentucky Campus.
“Having worked with very special patients over the years and witnessing the effects of poverty on very hard-working individuals, I personally believe — and I am speaking for myself — that I owe it to them,” she said. “I owe it to humanity to be able to provide care for patients and provide them with the best health possible for them.”
Working as a meat salesman who traveled around from city to city, Robinson retired after 40 years; however, his wife wasn’t old enough to qualify for Medicare (the requirement is age 65), so Robinson began working part-time driving a special service bus for the Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky so his wife would have insurance.
Back then, Robinson said he didn’t have the same medical needs that he has now that he’s gotten older, so he could still afford his medications. His morning routine includes seven different pills, and his nighttime routine includes three more.
“A lot of the retirees like myself on Social Security — $2,500 a month — don’t last when it comes to buying medicine, car payment, rent. Which one would you prefer: medicine or to eat?” Robinson said. “I would have just quit taking medicine if it’s the only option you got.”
Brighton Center Chief Impact Officer Melissa Hall Sommer said the people who walk through their doors seeking assistance range from retirees to young families to single mothers.
Brighton Center, located at 741 Central Ave. in Newport, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that works to create opportunities for individuals and families to reach self-sufficiency through family support services, education, employment and leadership.
“We see folks who are retired, who thought that they worked every day of their lives, hit 65 and 67 and think this is the time when they can be retired,” Hall Sommer said. “What they’re finding is usually, because of the cost of housing, that they are paying out the majority of their security benefits to be housed and having to go back to work.”
Medicare is U.S. government health insurance. It is mainly for people aged 65 and older, but some younger people with disabilities and people with certain serious conditions like end-stage kidney disease qualify as well. Even with Medicare, people may still pay monthly premiums, deductibles, copays and coinsurance.
Medicare is not the same as Medicaid. Medicare is mainly based on age and disability, while Medicaid is based on low income.
Robinson said he typically drives from his home in Edgewood to the pharmacy in Newport once every three months to pick up his medications. Why does he visit the free pharmacy? For Robinson, being on Medicare means that sometimes his medicine is $30, and sometimes that same prescription costs $400.
Faith Community Health Network Director of External Relations Denise Bowman said Medicare is like a doughnut.
“With Medicare, there’s doughnuts, right?” Bowman said. “They go through the spurt where they get so much coverage, and then it’s like a hole where they have no coverage. Then it’s up to them to pay out of pocket for their medications. So sometimes, either the Medicare cost is higher, and so that can cause a problem where patients can’t afford that high copay. Or two, they fall in that doughnut hole, and they don’t get coverage, and so then they can’t afford the prescriptions.”
The option to opt into traditional Medicare have been around since Medicare’s inception in 1965. Medicare Advantage plans are the government allowing other insurers to operationalize and manage Medicare health plans. Examples of those other insurers include Humana, Wellcare, Buckeye and Medical Mutual.
Those on a Medicare Advantage plan have copays for certain types of services. For instance, if someone sees their primary care physician, there is a $0 copay, whereas if they see a specialist, the copay could be between $30 and $40. Hospital stays are between $300 and $375 per day for a certain number of days, and then the plan kicks in.
In Medicare prescription drug plans, or Medicare Part D, medicines are grouped into tiers.
The tier usually determines how much you pay for the medication. Tier 1 and Tier 2 are typically lower cost, with copays of $5 to $10, and are more generic drugs. Tier 3 and Tier 4 are brand-name medications and specialty drugs. Those come with a high cost from your own wallet because insurance is less willing to pay for it.
Faith Community Health Network Executive Director Aaron Broomall told LINK nky in March that the pharmacy has been growing about 20% a year over the last couple of years. In 2025, the pharmacy helped over 1,100 people with more than $3.3 million worth of prescriptions. That’s over 24,000 90-day prescriptions that it gave away.
Because of the demand the pharmacy has seen, the Faith Community Health Network opened NKY’s first full-time, free health clinic in May. The clinic is upstairs from the pharmacy, so patients can get everything they need in one trip.
Broomall said the original plan was to open a clinic by late 2027, but then the Big Beautiful Bill passed. The bill was signed into law on July 4, 2025, and made changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act by adding work requirements, increasing eligibility checks and tightening enrollment rules in an effort to reduce federal spending.
While the law did not directly change Medicare, healthcare experts say it could indirectly affect Medicare recipients by increasing prescription drug costs and making it harder for low-income seniors who rely on both Medicare and Medicaid to afford care. Healthcare advocates worry the changes could affect how medications are assigned to Medicare drug tiers, potentially leading to higher copays and stricter coverage rules for some prescriptions.
“At the end of 2025, it was estimated that Boone, Kenton and Campbell [counties] had somewhere between 18,000 and 24,000 uninsured individuals, and by 2027, that number could be up over 40,000 uninsured individuals,” Broomall said.
Robinson has Type 2 diabetes. Because of that, he takes Trulicity, which is a once-weekly prescription injectable medication used to improve blood sugar control. It is considered a Tier 3 medication. He gets Trulicity and Basaglar (a long-acting human insulin analog) from the free pharmacy.
According to Medicare’s website Trulicity’s list price reaches approximately $987 per month, but Medicare coverage dramatically reduces these costs for most patients. Medicare Part D and some Medicare Advantage plans “may cover Trulicity for Type 2 diabetes management, but coverage depends on the plan’s formulary. About 70% of Trulicity prescriptions cost between $0 and $100 per month with Medicare Part D, while others average $207 monthly.”
Basaglar is usually covered under Medicare Part D and capped at $35 per month.
“Without that, I can say it would probably take my whole social security check to pay for the medicine, and most probably still be short,” he said.
Danneman said in her role as regional dean for the UK College of Medicine–Northern Kentucky Campus, she supports students’ education so they are in tune with social determinants of health, as well as other aspects of health that aren’t always as obvious, such as food insecurity, housing insecurity or lack of access to adequate health care.
“I liken it often when I’m teaching my students to riding a bike,” she said. “I learned how to ride a bike when I was very young, and now I can ride a bike with proficiency. It’s something I can do without even thinking about it, because it’s just something normal for me. I want them to care for the underserved in the same way. I want them to consider it to be something that is just understood, expected and done without a significant amount of thought, because it was so ingrained in them during the formative years of their education.”
Danneman also serves on the board for Faith Community Health Network.
Her students will be part of the care team at the free clinic. They already provide free care to people experiencing homelessness at the Emergency Shelter of Northern Kentucky two evenings a week. They also provide free care to patients at the Florence Christian Church, one Saturday a month, for people experiencing homelessness in Boone County.
“I feel like the only way that we can truly achieve a healthy Northern Kentucky is to take care of those who have found themselves in the most destitution,” Danneman said. “Those are patients who, oftentimes, at no fault of their own, have very limited access to primary care and health care.”
Without access to preventative or primary care, many uninsured patients delay treatment until conditions become emergencies.
Danneman said it is not uncommon to see patients who are coming to hospitals in the area with concerns that they have allowed to progress too far and now find themselves in a really serious situation, which she said could have been avoided with early healthcare access.
Many of those people, Danneman said, will avoid accessing health care due to an inability to pay. Many residents fall into what healthcare advocates call the “coverage gap” — earning too much to qualify for public assistance programs but not enough to comfortably afford private insurance premiums, deductibles or prescription drug costs.
“There’s a large number of working poor who make too much money to qualify for federal assistance, but don’t make enough money to be able to purchase private insurance coverage for themselves, and so they fall into this gap of not having any health insurance,” Danneman said.
Danneman said that even if it doesn’t affect you directly, it will affect you indirectly through personal access to care and delays in care.
“It has an effect on our entire healthcare system,” Danneman said. “With delays in regard to people’s ability to obtain emergency medical services because of the long line. It also causes a burden in regard to increased healthcare costs, because the large expense of an emergency medicine visit is oftentimes written off, and that ultimately affects the bottom line.”
According to Cliniconex, a healthcare communication organization, “the average cost of an emergency room visit is $1,389, compared to a much lower average of $167 for a visit to a primary care physician. This financial disparity is even more striking for uninsured individuals.”
Dr. Rob Tracy sits on Faith Community Health Network’s board and worked with the network to open the clinic.
Tracy told LINK nky in March that one impact he thinks the clinic will have on the region is to decrease the number of people in the emergency room seeking primary care.
“We often see there are multiple bed holds where they don’t have enough room in the hospital for those folks,” Tracy said. “If we can administer preventative care ahead of time, we can hopefully prevent a lot of these people from having to go to the emergency department with a very high cost of healthcare in an essentially free setting.”
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Danneman said it is also very difficult for the working poor to take time off to seek care because they don’t have the job flexibility.
The free clinic, offering a one-stop shop for patients to receive care, could be a solution to that. The clinic currently has four exam rooms, with space to expand. It is staffed primarily by physicians, with some nurse practitioners and physician assistants volunteering their time.
The clinic has a lab that can analyze blood work and other tests that someone might get during an annual physical. Those lab tests are ready in 20 minutes or less, so that everything can be taken care of in one appointment.
“We’ll get the lab results back, we’ll determine a care plan with them and then we’ll prescribe if prescribing is necessary,” Broomall said. “This is the other thing that sets us apart — that person is able to just walk right down to our pharmacy and pick up their scripts before they leave that day.”
When patients come in without insurance, Danneman said the goal is to connect them with organizations that can help them obtain affordable insurance, Medicaid or Medicare based on their needs. They also plan to use their community partners, like the Brighton Center, to help patients get the other services they need.
Hall Sommer said that the Brighton Center considers all the things folks might not think of. If it is that they haven’t registered for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, it’s getting them those benefits in place so they can feel some stability as they move toward self-sufficiency.
“The misnomer here is that people are reliant on the systems,” she said. “They are needing the systems to build to something more. It’s a mechanism of economic development. We invest in people to reach their hopes and dreams to continue to be able to contribute to the economy as they already are.”
Robinson said he’s been considering quitting driving when his car lease is up next March, but that won’t stop him from receiving his medications. The pharmacy offers a free mail service to deliver people’s prescriptions if they can’t make it to the pharmacy.
So while Robinson decides what is most suitable for him, he knows that it won’t come at the expense of his health.
“It’s like a big Jenga,” Hall Sommer said. “Everything is built on something else, and when you pull a piece out, you’re just holding your breath, seeing if it’s all going to fall.”
