Cancer and medical debt push Texas voter from Trump to Talarico

Paxton proposes $25,000 tax deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses

Cindy Banda fought breast cancer through a year of chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, and the bills that came with it changed how she votes. The 46-year-old McAllen, Texas, resident cast an early ballot for James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminary student running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat, after backing Donald Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. Her treatment costs — more than $25,000 for surgery, chemo and radiation, plus a cancer-targeting medication listed at $16,000 a month and reduced to $500 by insurance — pushed a voter who had spent years casting anti-abortion ballots toward a candidate whose positions she had opposed.

Surgeons removed Banda’s right breast at the Houston cancer center a year before the report, and she still did not know whether treatment had eliminated the cancer. Doctors had told her it would be tough to beat. Banda said, “I’m more of a positive person myself,” but the bills were harder to dismiss. Her first impulse was to maintain normalcy and stability for the children. As a single mother with six children in her care, she repeated something like a mantra: “Keep the house. Keep the cars. And just keep the kids stable.”

Treatment and household pressure reshape Banda’s priorities

At one visit, a doctor said Banda’s 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. The doctor said surgery might occur earlier if the skin around her surgical scar loosened. The doctor who gave her the diagnosis had hugged Banda, and she sobbed even though she rarely cried in front of other people. During chemotherapy, her children took turns shaving off her wispy hair. When her 9-year-old daughter’s hand quivered, a teenage cousin helped guide the clipper over her scalp.

Banda had been on sick leave for one year from her job selling Spectrum’s internet service, and she needed the income to support her three children and three more she had taken in after her sister’s death. At one appointment, she was ushered into a sterile room, where her phone displayed a TD Auto Finance message: “Please contact TD Auto Finance.” The car-payment bill was $1,300. “This one’s $1,300,” she said. “I have to go back to work.”

Two weeks later, Banda was back at work making door-to-door rounds to sell Spectrum’s Wi-Fi in McAllen, a city along the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley. Holding blue flyers, she walked past storefronts, some shuttered since she last was in the area. She had no sale or commission since October of the previous year, after her biopsy and diagnosis. After posting flyers on empty storefronts, she drove to pick up her children from school. The next morning, she had a barbershop meeting scheduled for what would be her first sale back at work.

Maintaining normalcy required roughly $7,000 a month for utilities, mortgage, car payments and groceries, along with two water leaks. Even with insurance through her job, the surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation added up to more than $25,000 that she had been paying off, making her one of tens of millions of people in the United States living with medical debt. Months of insecurity took a sleepless toll, and she needed to make internet sales to catch up.

Her experience came within a health-care industry that saves lives while taking in more than $5 trillion every year, as the Associated Press reporting described. At the Houston cancer center, where her Ford Expedition stopped in a vast parking lot, rows of cars marked patients arriving for chemotherapy or radiation. She paid $8 for parking as she left.

Banda tried not to dwell on death and debt. “It’ll consume you,” she said. She covered those thoughts with a bubbly demeanor, avoided being alone and relied on positivity to suppress fear, though the Associated Press account described that truce as brittle. Certain thoughts still arrived uninvited. Her late sister, Melissa, had no life insurance, and Banda made sure that payment was never missed. “Sometimes I think, and I shouldn’t think like this, but I’m worth more gone than here,” she said one day. “Obviously, the goal is not that, the goal is to beat it,” she continued, “to keep the house and keep the cars.”

Talarico and Paxton offer different health-care approaches

In a September Fox News poll, about half of registered voters said health-care costs were a major problem for them and their families, up from a little more than one-third four years earlier. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from the same month found registered voters nearly twice as likely to say they trusted Democrats over Republicans to handle health care. With party control of Congress at stake in the Nov. 3 midterms, the reporting said those frustrations, combined with broader concerns about rising prices, had sapped support for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Talarico and his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, offered different approaches to health care. Talarico wants all Americans to be able to join Medicare, while Paxton proposed a $25,000 tax deduction for out-of-pocket medical expenses. Talarico, who has diabetes and worked in the Texas Statehouse on measures to lower the price of insulin, spoke about both when he visited one of Banda’s fundraisers. “Imagine if he can do that for the cancer,” she said.

Talarico also supports a law guaranteeing abortion access nationwide, a position Banda had voted against for years. A lifelong Christian, she had voted her anti-abortion stance in past elections. When Melissa 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, and it also made her rethink her politics.

Banda voted for Trump in 2016. His first four years seemed steady to her, so she voted for him again in 2020. She said President Joe Biden’s tenure, including the tail end of a global pandemic and rising inflation, “felt like bedlam,” and she voted for Trump to return to the White House in 2024. Two years later, while fighting an expensive disease, she had found no respite from high prices.

After she slid into debt to stay alive, after her grocery bills mounted and the high school had to cover the cost of her children’s soccer gear she could not afford, her anti-abortion concerns were superseded by costs. “Because it’s what I’m living,” she said. “I’m living it.” Banda cast an early ballot for Talarico and wrote in a text with a blue heart emoji: “Never voted Democrat before today!!”

Family support and medical uncertainty shape the outlook

Banda has leaned on a network of relatives, classmates and strangers. On top of child support, the father of her 9-year-old often pays $400 a week for a nanny to help with the children. Her own father, Fidel Banda, sent her $700 before her recent Houston appointment, one of his many cash infusions. Her high school classmates, whom she had not been in close touch with in decades, raised money selling grilled chicken, rice and beans from a roadside tent. Two GoFundMe fundraisers brought in nearly $30,000, and she rented her late sister’s house while placing her own in forbearance.

Banda had just started the new cancer-targeting medication, which cost $16,000 a month before insurance reduced the price to $500. By the afternoon, she was nauseous and fatigued, unable to eat. The malaise kept her home the next day and cost her a morning meeting at a barbershop where she hoped to close her first sale since getting sick, though she felt confident it was in the bag.

She nevertheless pushed through the discomfort one evening to join her family as they replaced the flowers at Melissa’s tomb. She drove past the headstones and oak trees in the evening’s slanting light, and the family gathered around Melissa Banda’s tomb in an open-air mausoleum. There was no speech. Fidel Banda methodically clipped and arranged the flowers for his daughter while Banda walked along the wall of tombs.

“This one’s for me,” Banda said, pointing to a blank tomb next to her sister’s. “Mom!” said her daughter with the huffiness of a 9-year-old. “Why would you say that?” Banda smiled and added, “in a hundred years.”

On Election Day, she will find out in a doctor’s office whether the cancer is in remission or has spread to her organs.