News bits: Zealots censoring tolerance; Tales from the free market

Insider writes about the radical right canceling a song about tolerance and accepting others:

Wisconsin 1st graders were told they couldn't sing 'Rainbowland' by Dolly Parton 

and Miley Cyrus because it was too controversial

"Rainbowland" includes the lyrics: "Living in a Rainbowland, The skies are blue and things are grand, Wouldn't it be nice to live in paradise, Where we're free to be exactly who we are, Let's all dig down deep inside, Brush the judgment and fear aside, Make wrong things right, And end the fight, 'Cause I promise ain't nobody gonna win."

That's just another example of the Christian Taliban in action in America today. They are going to crush tolerance, secularism and democracy or die trying.

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ProPublica writes about how one health care insurance company does business:

How Cigna Saves Millions by Having 

Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them

The vague wording [of his rejected medical reimbursement claim] made Dr. Nick van Terheyden suspect that Dr. Cheryl Dopke, the medical director who signed it, had not taken much care with his case.

Van Terheyden was right to be suspicious. His claim was just one of roughly 60,000 that Dopke denied in a single month last year, according to internal Cigna records reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The rejection of van Terheyden’s claim was typical for Cigna, one of the country’s largest insurers. The company has built a system that allows its doctors to instantly reject a claim on medical grounds without opening the patient file, leaving people with unexpected bills, according to corporate documents and interviews with former Cigna officials. Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show. The company has reported it covers or administers health care plans for 18 million people.  

Before health insurers reject claims for medical reasons, company doctors must review them, according to insurance laws and regulations in many states. Medical directors are expected to examine patient records, review coverage policies and use their expertise to decide whether to approve or deny claims, regulators said. This process helps avoid unfair denials.

But the Cigna review system that blocked van Terheyden’s claim bypasses those steps. Medical directors do not see any patient records or put their medical judgment to use, said former company employees familiar with the system. Instead, a computer does the work. A Cigna algorithm flags mismatches between diagnoses and what the company considers acceptable tests and procedures for those ailments. Company doctors then sign off on the denials in batches, according to interviews with former employees who spoke on condition of anonymity.  

Within Cigna, some executives questioned whether rendering such speedy denials satisfied the law, according to one former executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he still works with insurers.

“We thought it might fall into a legal gray zone,” said the former Cigna official, who helped conceive the program. “We sent the idea to legal, and they sent it back saying it was OK.”  

In a written response, Cigna said the reporting by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum was “biased and incomplete.”

It is OK to have a computer reject your insurance claim, legal said so. And so did the computer! Saying otherwise is just biased and incomplete.

So much for the rule of law and social conscience. If a law gets in the way of profit, just blow it off or get your lobbyists to get the law obliterated. That's just how brass knuckles capitalism works whenever it can. 

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Tales from Fauxlandia: NBC News reports:

Ex-Tucker Carlson producer files new claims Fox News lawyers 

coached her testimony in Dominion lawsuit

Abby Grossberg sued Fox last week, alleging she was coerced into giving misleading testimony about the network's election fraud coverage. She was fired Friday.

America Is Preoccupied

America Is Daydreaming

America Is Crackpotting

America Is Banning Books

America Is Not Concentrating

But Tucker the Liar is serious about getting 

to the bottom of the barrel, . . uh, . . story

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From the Let's Kill Them All Files, legal wizards, not lizards, have dreamed up a snagglepuss of a new legal theory. It's published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review in a paper entitled Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths. This one is a real gullywhumper. The wizards write:

Prosecutors regularly bring homicide charges against individuals and corporations whose reckless or negligent acts or omissions cause unintentional deaths, as well as those whose misdemeanors or felonies cause unintentional deaths. Fossil fuel companies learned decades ago that what they produced, marketed, and sold would generate “globally catastrophic” climate change. Rather than alert the public and curtail their operations, they worked to deceive the public about these harms and to prevent regulation of their lethal conduct. They funded efforts to call sound science into doubt and to confuse their shareholders, consumers, and regulators. And they poured money into political campaigns to elect or install judges, legislators, and executive officials hostile to any litigation, regulation, or competition that might limit their profits. Today, the climate change that they forecast has already killed thousands of people in the United States, and it is expected to become increasingly lethal for the foreseeable future. 

Activists and journalists declaim the executives of ExxonMobil, Shell, and other large oil companies as “mass murderers.” Lamenting that “millions of human beings will die so that they can have private planes and huge mansions,” they talk of “[d]ragging the corporate titans who profited from driving the world to the brink before a judge.” But as of this writing [Jan. 25, 2023], no prosecutor in any jurisdiction is bringing homicide charges of any kind against fossil fuel companies (FFCs) for even a single death related to climate change. They should. 

The case for homicide prosecutions is increasingly compelling. A steady growth in the information about what FFCs knew and what they did with that knowledge is revealing a story of antisocial conduct generating lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history.

Woof! Lethal harm so extensive it may soon become unparalleled in human history? The FFCs are in big trouble now. That is gonna scare the jebus out of those feisty Huge Oil Co. executives and their lackeys in congress, the courts, etc. 

They are gonna stop polluting, killing and propagandizing real quick, right? Nah. They are going to yawn and buy black smokers for their employees to show their sincere support for the environment.

Take that, you evil socialist 

environment