RAND PAUL’S HILARIOUS — YET REVEALING — OBAMACARE EXPLANATION: GUESS WHAT NEW INJURY CODES ARE INCLUDED
Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) (AP)
Obamacare will require doctors to use roughly 122,000 new medical diagnostic codes to inform the federal government of injuries sustained by Americans, so says Kentucky Senator Rand Paul.
The new codes, Sen. Paul explained, include classifications for “injuries sustained from a turtle,” “walking into a lamppost” and “injuries sustained from burning water skis.”
“Your government just wants to take care of you,” he added, criticizing the new law’s 9,000-plus pages of new regulations. “They don’t think you’re smart enough to make these decisions.”
Physicians currently have about 18,000 medical diagnostic codes to choose from to help them inform insurers of their patients’ ailments. However, as Paul (himself a physician) notes, Obamacare includes a mandate for 140,000 of those codes — and some of them sound downright ridiculous.
“Included among these codes,” the senator continued, “will be 312 new codes for injuries from animals; 72 new codes for injuries just from birds; 9 new codes for ‘injuries from the macaw.”‘
“The macaw?” he asked. “I’ve asked physicians all over the country, ‘Have you ever seen an injury from a macaw?”‘
He continued, adding that he had found “two new injury codes under Obamacare for ‘injuries sustained from a turtle.”‘
“Now, you might say, ‘Well, turtles are dangerous’ — but why do you have to have two codes?” he asked. “Your doctor has to inform the government whether you’ve been struck by a turtle or bitten by a turtle.”
He added: “There is a new code for … walking into a lamppost. There’s also a code for ‘walking into a lamppost, subsequent encounter.’”
“I guess that’s if you don’t learn,” he added. “[T]here is [also] a code … for ‘injuries sustained from burning water skis.”‘
Though the Republican senator delivered his speech earlier this month to the Iowa Republican Party, his Obamacare remarks have only recently gained traction online:
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Good Lord, Tom. None of this is in Obamacare! You may no longer call me "naive" and "gullible." Fact-check some this stuff yourself before you post it. I am getting tired.
ReplyDeleteIt was done during the Bush administration, and would go into effect in 2011 whether we had Obamacare or not…
"Developed almost 30 years ago, ICD-9 is now widely viewed as outdated because of its limited ability to accommodate new procedures and diagnoses. ICD-9 contains only 17,000 codes and is expected to start running out of available codes next year. By contrast, the ICD-10 code sets contain more than 155,000 codes and accommodate a host of new diagnoses and procedures. The additional codes will help to enable the implementation of electronic health records because they will provide more detail in the electronic transactions. This granularity will also help to improve efficiencies by helping to identify specific health conditions such as Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and other conditions."
http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2008pres/08/20080815a.html
--David