Government to Add 122,000 Additional Medical Billing Codes
Medicare has about 7,500 different tasks for which physicians can get reimbursed. If you add in regional adjustments, there are potentially 6 billion different prices. If this isn’t complicated enough, doctors and hospital currently have about 18,000 different billing codes they can use when sending bills to insurers. However, the federal government doesn’t believe 18,000 codes allows for enough detail. According to the Wall Street Journal:
A new federally mandated version will expand the number to around 140,000—adding codes that describe precisely what bone was broken, or which artery is receiving a stent.
It will also have a code for recording that a patient’s injury occurred in a chicken coop. (See code.)
Indeed, health plans may never again wonder where a patient got hurt. There are codes for injuries in opera houses (see code), art galleries (see code), squash courts (see code) and nine locations in and around a mobile home (see codes), from the bathroom to the bedroom.
The level of detail is astounding. For example, there are three different codes for getting bitten by a squirrel. See for yourself.
Proponents of government payers like Medicare are giddy about it efficiency. Yet, this is the same government forcing providers to navigate and use 140,000 different billing codes. If someone is bitten by a cat, does it really matter whether it’s the initial encounter or a subsequent encounter — in the bedroom of a mobile home? Is the aggregate data that can be gleaned from the billing claims data – showing that being bitten repeatedly by a cat while in bed in your mobile home is a common problem – really worth the additional effort required of doctors and hospitals?
Why do they need different codes for whether you are bitten by a turtle or hit by a turtle? Whoever gets hit by a turtle? I wonder if there’s a code for being attacked by an assailant using a turtle as a deadly weapon?
Have they criminalized the incorred coding of a squirrel bite yet?
What medical advantage does knowing some of these distinctions provide? Or are there reasons other than medicine to gather this information?
Wow! I guess I didn’t realize that squirrel bites and turtle attacks were such a problem in the United States. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who admitted to getting bitten by a squirrel or assaulted by a turtle (or anyone using a turtle as a weapon).
My favorite: “Struck by falling object on merchant ship, subsequent encounter”
Because after being struck the first time, you weren’t smart enough to get out of the way…
The term “pecked to death by ducks” has long been used as a metaphor for dealing with pointless demands from bureaucrats whom one cannot avoid. Now, it has become literal!
What I found astonishing in the WSJ article was that the U.S. had added more codes and complexity to the ICD-10 system that has been used in other countries for about a decade. I used to wonder why it took so long for the U.S. to migrate!
So, it appears that we now have another variable that will cause administrative costs in U.S. health care to needlessly increase.
Of course, the usuals suspects will continue to blame the “profit motive” for these costs.
Injured by water skis on fire?????
So what happens when I move my Macaw from the chicken coop into the doublewide master bedroom and I knock over my left water ski into the fireplace, catching it on fire and causing my turtle to leap from the mantel piece, striking my left ear and spilling his carrots, causing me to go into anaphylactic shock so badly I stumble and fracture my left posterior antebellum? So now we have a code for that?
I guess only if they run me into the lamppost on the way to the ambulance…