Pretty sure this song is the most heartbreakingly beautiful thing ever to result from pornographic email spam.

Does your heart echo like a hall
‘Cause there’s no one there at all

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Zoë Keating has added a donate button to her site. And when her throng of social media followers got involved and the local CBS affiliate covered her story, Anthem Blue Cross immediately backtracked and told her that of course her husband’s hospital stay would be covered; it was all the hospital’s fault for failing to fill out the proper paperwork.

From Zoë’s transcript of that conversation:

Me: ok, thank you. so going forward. say something happens to my son and I have to go to the hospital with my son. how can i stop this from happening the next time? because you can imagine when you have a catastrophic illness happen to your family, it’s not like you have a heck of a lot of time to be on the phone with the insurance company all day and to be filing more paperwork and all this stuff and, i actually don’t feel like i should have to be doing that. so is this going to happen again the next time we go to the hospital?

(Emphasis mine.) And the thing is, it’s almost worse that they (Anthem) caved so quickly. It’s the tell that this was business as usual: Deny coverage, make the patient or the patient’s representative fight it, tilt the gradient in favor of the insurer. And if and when you get caught in the spotlight, make a big show of doing the right thing.

And in the meantime, in the shadows, keep doing the same thing, a million times over.

It’s a solved problem. Maybe one day we’ll stop tormenting people already undergoing the worst experiences imaginable just because, you know, that’s how we’ve always done it.

I hadn’t heard this performance of Zinc before. It’s one of my favorite pieces of hers, one that symbolizes so much to me: cycles of life, from the smallest to the largest scale. Birth and death. Evolution and extinction. Love and loss.

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