Government Healthcare: Codes That Kill -- by Richard Fleming, M.D.

The New American ^ | 16 July 2013 | Richard Fleming, M.D.

[VitacoreVision]

The U.S. government is using its payment system to control the types of medical treatment Americans get, leading to high medical costs and high mortality.

Government Healthcare: Codes That Kill


Richard Fleming, M.D. | The New American
16 July 2013

....

Calling a Code

The rationale behind using the codes is supposedly to ensure that Medicare -- the government -- only pays for medically necessary services for disease, disability, infirmity, or impairment. The codes, developed by the AMA, are known as the Physicians’ Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) system.

But fiscal probity doesn't seem to be the actual reason for the codes. They are currently being used to give the government control over patient treatment protocols.

The CPT codes and International Classification of Disease (ICD) codes, which identify the illness or health problem the person is seeing the doctor for, are promulgated by the federal government and are the code numbers any physician or hospital system must provide to the government or insurance companies to determine if the physician or hospital will get paid for tests on or treatment of patients. If you don't follow government guidelines, you don’t get paid.
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Full Story:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/item/15911-government-healthcare-codes-that-kill

[originalbuckeye]

Doctors will be fined if they do a procedure or a surgery outside the Government guidelines. I hope only Libs will suffer, but I know we all will.

[Weirdad]

Good article topic. The article itself is excessively long for the point it is trying and it jumps around to try to work in all its examples.

If you control the language that can be used, then you control what people can talk about and what thoughts can be thought!

When you make a language and require that only it be used, you control the topic of conversation completely.

That is what has been done they this article criticizes.

Some related points:

The AMA makes more money selling its “CPT Codes” (these are what gets billed for) than it does from its own members!

And they have copyrighted the codes and they aggressively enforce that no one can use them unless the AMA gets paid.

You cannot even have a web site listing comparisons of prices for various CPT codes charged by different doctors without paying the AMA.

And yet the AMA and the government have officially colluded (private-public fascism) such that CPT codes are REQUIRED to be used.

You have to use only the language the AMA owns and you have to pay them if you want to be able to use it fluently.

The ICD-9 and ICD-10 codes are free for the public to use. However, then are imprecise and awkward and distort reality. They are a bad language for describing diseased states that require procedures for which money is charged. Codes are guessed at and mis-used because they are so bad, so medical communication with them has all the precision and subtly of ghetto-talk. But they’ve got electrolytes!

FREE MARKET medical language needs to rise up and be recognized and take over as a better standard. And yet if all doctors got together and decided to push that, they would be sued for restraint of trade!

If insurance was for unpredictable risks only, and was not handled by employers or made a tax-darling with strings attached, then it all would become so simple that simple private systems would suffice.

[publius911]

Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

[Cyclone59]

unfortunately I would bet that the welfare RAT voting section 8 living get procedures approved where as the suburban conservative get turned down for the same procedure. Gotta keep that voting stock well enough to keep the RATS in office.

[Shery]

If the government thinks that good doctors will stick around in order to go to jail over a missed code...? No, nor would I. This is absolutely ridiculous! But, as much as it is that, it will get much worse, I’m certain.