McALLEN, Texas (AP) — The Ford Expedition rumbled to a stop and Cindy Banda's bedazzled flip-flops landed on the asphalt of the Houston cancer center's vast parking lot. She threaded through the rows of cars, a tally of patients who gather here to sit with chemotherapy needles or lie on radiation machines.
The elevator dinged open. A year ago in this building, surgeons removed Banda's right breast, and she still didn't know whether treatment had expunged the cancer from her body. Doctors had told her it would be tough to beat.
"I'm more of a positive person myself," Banda said, now sitting with a white wristband in a dim waiting room. But the bills are harder to dismiss, and the single mother with six children in her care repeated something like a mantra. "Keep the house. Keep the cars. And just keep the kids stable."
She had been on sick leave from her job selling internet service for one year, and she needed the income to support her three kids and three more she had taken in after her sister's death.
The doctor said her reconstruction surgery could be scheduled early next year. "I was hoping for maybe December," Banda said, "only because I've met my deductibles." Come January, she would have to pay down the $7,500 again. Earlier may be possible, the doctor replied, if the skin around her surgical scar loosens.
Banda's first impulse was to maintain normalcy, stability, for the children.
But that requires roughly $7,000 a month for utilities, mortgage, car payments and groceries, along with the two water leaks. Then, even with insurance through her job, the surgeries, chemo and radiation added up to over $25,000 that she's been paying off, making Banda one of tens of millions of other people in the United States in medical debt.
Banda tries not to dwell on death and debt.
Turning on Trump and voting Democratic for the first time
A lifelong Christian, Banda had voted her anti-abortion stance in past elections. When her sister was kidnapped and murdered by her ex-husband in 2020, Banda retreated from religion. The cancer brought her back to church with an apology to God, but it also made her rethink her politics.
She voted for Trump in 2016, and his first four years seemed steady, so she voted for him again in 2020. Democratic President Joe Biden's tenure, including the tail end of a global pandemic and rising inflation, felt like bedlam, so she voted for Trump to return to the White House in 2024.
But two years later and fighting an expensive disease, she had found no respite from high prices.
So when James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminary student running for
U.S. Senate as a Democrat, visited one of Banda's fundraisers — speaking about his diabetes and his work in the Texas Statehouse to lower the price of insulin — it moved her. "Imagine if he can do that for the cancer," she said.
Talarico and his Republican opponent, state Attorney General Ken Paxton, have different approaches to healthcare. Talarico wants all Americans to be able to join Medicare; Paxton proposed a $25,000 tax deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses.
Talarico also supports a law guaranteeing abortion access nationwide, which Banda has voted against for years. But after she slid into debt to stay alive, after her grocery bills mounted and the high school had to comp the kids' soccer gear she couldn't afford, Banda's anti-abortion concerns have been superseded by costs.
"Because it's what I'm living," she said. "I'm living it."
Banda cast an early ballot for Talarico. "Never voted Democrat before today!!" she wrote in a text with blue heart emoji.
McALLEN, Texas (AP) — The Ford Expedition rumbled to a stop and Cindy Banda’s bedazzled flip-flops landed on the asphalt of the Houston cancer center’s vast parking lot. She threaded through the rows ...
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