Government Gone Wild: Medical Service Codes Multiply By Ten!

Bitten by a...

Wall Street Journal

Today, hospitals and doctors use a system of about 18,000 codes to describe medical services in bills they send to insurers. Apparently, that doesn’t allow for quite enough nuance. 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 the code.

Via Mark Perry, who adds: “A search of the code database reveals that there are 12 codes for injuries from alligators.”

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