We spike our blood pressure with a discussion about recent reporting on the systems used by health insurers to automate rejecting claims. It’s one of those classic situations we all know and love: human doctors rubber stamping algorithmic decisions in a system created by a private equity ghoul to save major insurers a few dollars by making the lives of real people significantly worse.
Stuff we reference
••• How Cigna Saves Millions by Having Its Doctors Reject Claims Without Reading Them https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-pxdx-medical-health-insurance-rejection-claims
••• Lina Khan: We Must Regulate A.I. Here’s How. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/opinion/ai-lina-khan-ftc-technology.html
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Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)
This week on the Best Of The Gist, we listen back to Mike’s Monday Spiel, in which he elaborates on all the recent news items he’s chosen not to discuss on the show. And then, his past week we aired Mike’s interview with Leon Neyfakh, the co-creator of a new Audible Original podcast about the music and life of the once king of pop, titled Think Twice: Michael Jackson, which prompted us to re-air Mike’s 2019 interview with Dan Reed, the director of the HBO documentary Leaving Wonderland, which detailed Jackson’s abuse of children as remembered by the children he abused.
Congratulations on finishing up college! So what are you going to do now?
Mary Long caught up with four Fools to get some actionable advice for new college grads. They discuss:
- What to do when you get your first paycheck. - How risk-averse grads can get in the stock market. - Preparing your finances for job hopping. - The difference between being a Rule Breaker and a Bridge Burner.
Stocks, ETFs mentioned: SPY, QQQ, BRK.B
Host: Mary Long Guests: Ron Gross, Alison Southwick, Robert Brokamp, David Gardner Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineer: Rick Engdahl
Quickie with Bob: Pangenome; News Items: Fake Studies, Germany and Nuclear Power, Moon Landing Hoax Again, Earth Viewed by Alien Civilization; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Dunning-Kruger Revisited; Science or Fiction
Britain’s popular and wholesome baking competition returns stateside with its spin-off “The Great American Baking Show.” And this season, Chicago is well represented, with three local residents heading to the English countryside and competing to best impress judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith. The Chicago contestants Martin Sorge, Sarah Chang and Nirali Chauan, join Reset for more on competing in the famous bake-off tent, the terror of the technical challenges and the friendships made along the way.
On today’s show we’re taking a look at the inherently risky nature of today’s financial system and why the U.S. government has blocked safer alternatives, courtesy of George Kaloudis, CoinDesk's senior research analyst and columnist.
Located in the 90th place on the periodic table is the element Thorium.
Thorium, as with every element, has unique properties, making it useful in certain applications.
However, Thorium’s best days might still be ahead of it and might move it to the front of the list of the world’s most important elements.
Learn more about Thorium, how it was discovered, and its potential uses on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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The dangerous, trailblazing work of a white journalist and black leader who struck a shocking early blow against legal segregation In 1948, most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for 10 million African Americans living in the Jim Crow South. Then, Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and alongside Atlanta s black civil rights pioneer John Wesley Dobbs lived as a black man in the South for thirty days. His impassioned newspaper series shocked millions and sparked the first nationally aired television-and-radio debate about ending America s shameful system of apartheid.
With 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South (Lyons Press, 2017), author Bill Steigerwald returns this long-forgotten part of American history to its rightful place among the seminal events of the Civil Rights movement. For 30 days and 3,000 miles, Sprigle and Dobbs traveled among dirt-poor sharecroppers, principals of ramshackle black schools, and families of lynching victims. The nationally syndicated newspaper series hit the media like an atom bomb, eliciting a fierce response from the Southern media. Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, eight years before Little Rock s Central High School was integrated, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffin s similar experiment became the bestselling Black Like Me, an unlikely pair of heroes brought black lives to the forefront of American consciousness.
