Welcome to my world

I don't often share my professional world with you but I have commented in the past about health care reform: the legislation passed with the goals of increasing access to health care and lowering health care costs. 

I am confident iwriting that no part of health care reform we have implemented for our clients has lowered health care costs (in fact, many parts have increased health care costs) and many components of the bill - lower government reimbursements for Medicare - will result in reduced access to providers. 

Carpe Diem looks at some of the new procedure codes we are in the process of programming.  Welcome to my world.

 

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  • 9/16/2011 8:11 PM Mark Spearman wrote:
    An interesting form of insurance fraud.

    So, are they going to have to make a code for every animal that could bite and every injury that the bite could cause? If it's a result of a car accident, they'll need codes for every different type of vehicle that could hit you too. This could go on and on.

    I can only imagine the massive costs that will be incurred as every piece of medical related software gets updated to comply with this new coding system.
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  • 9/17/2011 10:08 AM Mark Spearman wrote:
    It was late when I wrote the last comment. I was just being sarcastic when I called it insurance fraud, but now that I've thought about it, it truly is. Here's how it will be manipulated.

    We all know how Obama enjoys creating money out of thin air and calling that "job creation". Well by fiddling with the code system, he'll be able to create jobs out of thin air and easily steal money from sick people.

    When the AMA changed codes, they'd usually add or consolidate codes. Every time this happened it caused a change. They had to keep it reasonable enough that there wasn't an uprising of people wanting to abandon their cash cow. Using a federal system, it's all up to the government. Like I said, "Are they going to do this for every animal that can bite?". Sure, if they see that people will need to be hired to make those changes to all of those systems. Job creation.

    They're going to have every bit of health information on every person. They will be able to query that information for things like, "What is the most common and least profitable illness or injury?". They easily find the answer and bump up the cost of that specific problem. Now they have increased revenue and the public just scratches their head on why that problem costs so much. In contrast, a private system that recognized a problem like this, would look for ways to streamline care and reduce the cost.

    There could also be ambiguous codes that people in the know could use for fraud as they do now. Now it's a matter of digging through the codes to come up with a claim that will go under the radar. With the government in control, it's just a matter of bribing a person to come up with a code that they will inform you flies under the fraud radar. The ability to detect this type fraud will be at the mercy of the government because these systems also depend on the code system.

    There are many things that could happen with the government in control of the code system that is the heart of any software. Given the ridiculous nature of the alligator attack, we have a glimpse of where it is going.
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