Blossoms arrive as a sign of spring, as do the pictures of roofs blown from their rightful places.

Storm season stinks, assuming Northwest Missouri can define the season. We went through an ice storm and persistent snowstorms in the past half-year. Our storms seem prolific and ignorant of calendar.

The current season brings threatening skies, high winds and clouds that spin and drop like a destruction lottery. St. Joseph got its turn a couple of weeks ago. Northern reaches of Kansas City got smacked Thursday.

Floridians complained in recent years about the frequency of their hurricanes, which are behemoth but slow-moving. People get days of warning. In our climes, they hang sirens in the hope a moment’s notice will save lives.

After a storm comes a real tempest, one familiar to anyone who’s filed a claim on a homeowner’s policy. Years of paid premiums don’t necessarily buy coverage for costs incurred by nature’s mayhem. It’s never a check delivered for damages received.

Rather than a contractual service, it’s more like a Persian bazaar, an exercise in the art of dickering. At the end of one such a negotiation in my life, I became convinced a hail storm was my fault.

For insurance companies, denial means dollars. In another context, physicians have their patient insurance claims denied with such regularity that an industry has arisen to better streamline the handling of this inevitability.

It is called denial management.

Opportunistic software companies brag of robust approaches to analyzing, correcting and preventing denial of claims. Of course, without such denials, they would have no work.

When the Wall Street Journal reported on this trend, it quoted a physician group’s administrator as saying, “The insurers outcode us, they outsmart us and they have more manpower.”

Aside from raising blood pressure and disrupting the sleep patterns of claimants, the term “denial management” has a uniquely American charm. It seems like something we should be good at.

Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the “Mission Accomplished” speech, the one in which President Bush flew to an aircraft carrier and declared the end of major combat operations in the Iraq war. Of course, the war persisted for five years in the aftermath.

To pre-empt the certain media scrutiny of this anniversary and the republication of pictures of that “Mission Accomplished” banner positioned over the president’s shoulder, the White House press secretary conceded the sign should have been more specific. It was meant, she said, to tout the carrier’s accomplishment of mission.

The Bush White House, she mourned, has paid a price for the misimpression.

It’s hard to gauge if anyone bit on this declaration of victimhood. For the lack of a qualifying statement, the fine print of political explanation, a disappointed public sees only hubris in a five-year-old event.

Or maybe it’s just a high-level example of denial management.

In our part of the world, we keep our eyes skyward each spring and hope for the best.

In Washington, they keep their eyes on wordplay and try to deny that certain storms ever existed.

Ken Newton’s column runs

on Sundays and Tuesdays.