![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/AP26295752488671-e1792938264993.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Ford Expedition rumbled to a stop and Cindy Banda\u2019s bedazzled flip-flops landed on the asphalt of the Houston cancer center\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The elevator dinged open. A year ago in this building, surgeons removed Banda\u2019s right breast, and she still didn\u2019t know whether treatment had expunged the cancer from her body. Doctors had told her it would be tough to beat.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m more of a positive person myself,\u201d 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. \u201cKeep the house. Keep the cars. And just keep the kids stable.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s true for many Americans, as\u00a0rising healthcare costs\u00a0leave more families with a sinking feeling after seeing the bill for surgery or medication. Heading into the Nov. 3 midterm elections, about half of registered voters said healthcare costs are a major problem for them and their families, up from a little more than one-third four years ago, according to a Fox News poll from September.<\/p>\n
With party control of Congress at stake, registered voters are nearly twice as likely to say they trust Democrats over Republicans\u00a0to handle healthcare, according to an\u00a0Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research\u00a0poll from the same month. Those frustrations, combined with broader concerns over rising prices,\u00a0have sapped support\u00a0for\u00a0President Donald Trump\u00a0and his Republican Party.<\/p>\n
Banda knows how that feels. She backed Trump in each of his three campaigns, motivated by her\u00a0opposition to abortion. But when cancer came, the ensuing scramble to make ends meet was painful enough to rearrange her priorities, and she started to think about voting Democratic for the first time.<\/p>\n
The 46-year-old was ushered into a sterile room for her appointment, her phone lit up with a text. \u201cPlease contact TD Auto Finance.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis one\u2019s $1,300,\u201d she said of the car payment bill. \u201cI have to go back to work.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
The doctor said her reconstruction surgery could be scheduled early next year. \u201cI was hoping for maybe December,\u201d Banda said, \u201conly because I\u2019ve met my deductibles.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The evening had cooled slightly by the time she walked back through the rows of parked cars, their ebb and flow marking the tide of sickness, survival and death in a small corner of a colossal healthcare industry that saves lives while taking in over $5 trillion every year.<\/p>\n
Banda paid $8 for parking as she left.<\/p>\n
Confronting death and debt in America before a midterm election<\/p>\n
Two weeks later, Banda was back at work, making door-to-door rounds to sell Spectrum\u2019s Wi-Fi in McAllen, her city along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley. Banda, holding blue flyers, walked along a row of storefronts, some that shuttered since she last was in the area.<\/p>\n
She hadn\u2019t had a sale and commission since October of last year, after the biopsy and diagnosis.<\/p>\n
The doctor who gave her the news had hugged Banda, and she sobbed even though she never really sobs in front of other people. During chemo, her children took turns buzzing off her wispy hair. When her 9-year-old daughter\u2019s hand quivered, a teenage cousin helped guide the clipper over her mother\u2019s scalp.<\/p>\n
Banda\u2019s first impulse was to maintain normalcy, stability, for the children.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s been paying off, making Banda one of tens of millions of other people in the United States in medical debt.<\/p>\n
Banda tries not to dwell on death and debt.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019ll consume you,\u201d she says. She smothers those thoughts beneath her bubbly demeanor and avoids being alone. But that truce, between her insistence on positivity and the fears that it covers, is brittle.<\/p>\n
Certain thoughts still arrive uninvited. Banda\u2019s late sister, Melissa, didn\u2019t have life insurance. Banda makes sure it\u2019s a payment she never misses.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes I think, and I shouldn\u2019t think like this, but I\u2019m worth more gone than here,\u201d she said one day. \u201cObviously, the goal is not that, the goal is to beat it,\u201d she continued, \u201cto keep the house and keep the cars.\u201d<\/p>\n
So far she has, with the help of others.<\/p>\n
On top of child support, the father of Banda\u2019s 9-year-old often pays $400 a week for a nanny to help with the kids. Banda\u2019s own father sent her $700 before for her recent Houston appointment, one of his many cash infusions. Her high school classmates, who she hadn\u2019t been in close touch with in decades, fundraised by selling grilled chicken, rice and beans from a roadside tent. Two GoFundMe fundraisers raised nearly $30,000 and Banda rented her late sister\u2019s house while putting her own in forbearance.<\/p>\n
But months of insecurity takes its own, sleepless toll. She needed to sell some internet services to catch up.<\/p>\n
After sticking the Spectrum Wi-Fi flyers onto empty storefronts, she drove to pick up her kids from school. The following day she had a morning meeting at a barbershop for what would be her first sale back at work.<\/p>\n
Turning on Trump and voting Democratic for the first time<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
But two years later and fighting an expensive disease, she had found no respite from high prices.<\/p>\n
So when James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminary student running for\u00a0U.S. Senate\u00a0as a Democrat, visited one of Banda\u2019s fundraisers \u2014 speaking about his diabetes and his work in the Texas Statehouse to lower the price of insulin \u2014 it moved her. \u201cImagine if he can do that for the cancer,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019 soccer gear she couldn\u2019t afford, Banda\u2019s anti-abortion concerns have been superseded by costs.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause it\u2019s what I\u2019m living,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m living it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Banda cast an early ballot for Talarico. \u201cNever voted Democrat before today!!\u201d she wrote in a text with blue heart emoji.<\/p>\n
Her news will come on Election Day, in a doctor\u2019s office<\/p>\n
Banda had just started a new cancer-targeting medication that cost $16,000 a month, reduced to $500 by insurance. By the afternoon, she was nauseous and fatigued, unable to eat. The malaise would keep her home the next day. She would miss the meeting with the barbershop to close her first deal since getting sick, though she felt confident it was in the bag.<\/p>\n
But Banda pushed through the discomfort one evening to join her family as they replaced the flowers at her sister\u2019s tomb.<\/p>\n
She drove past the headstones and oak trees in the evening\u2019s slanting light, and the family gathered around Melissa Banda\u2019s tomb in an open-air mausoleum. There was no speech. Their eulogy was her father, Fidel Banda, methodically clipping and arranging the flowers for his daughter.<\/p>\n
Banda walked along the wall of tombs. She will find out on Election Day whether the cancer is in remission or whether it\u2019s spread to her organs.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis one\u2019s for me,\u201d she said, pointing to a blank tomb next to her sister\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cMom!\u201d said her daughter with the huffiness of a 9-year-old. \u201cWhy would you say that?\u201d<\/p>\n
Banda smiled and added, \u201cin a hundred years.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Trump #supporter #Democrat #time #medical #bills #outweigh #antiabortion #stance<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Ford Expedition rumbled to a stop and Cindy Banda\u2019s bedazzled flip-flops landed on the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[245],"tags":[23560,1974,13921,2901,2277,23559,4541,23558,14,721],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19002"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19002\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}