There are a couple of insurance horror stories doing the rounds at the moment from America. One concerns a programmer friend of Brad Choate’s, whose child has an expensive cancer which will go untreated if his father cannot find a job with medical insurance — Choate is the man responsible for all the pretty smart quotes on this and a million other MT blogs.
The other, I discovered ten days back, is a Texan singer/songwriter named Alejandro Escovedo, who has Hep C, cirrhosis, and no medical insurance. I ordered one of his CDs from Amazon, because I’m a sucker for the stuff that’s now known as Americana. It just came htis morning. I urge you all to save this man’s liver and buy some for your own collections. I’m just listening to a completely wonderful version of “Sway”, for younger readers, a song by the Rolling Stones, a popular singing group, which manages to invest it with all the poisonous melancholy that the lyrics deserve by adding a cello and a violin. I’m not sure that “completely wonderful” and “poisonous melancholy” fit well in the same sentence. But this is impressive stuff. And maybe with a new liver he’ll write some happy songs.