I now work for a healthcare company, and before that a hospital software company, and be it knownst that the Obamacare legal abomination carries a LOT more than just the lying insurance cover.
INTERNATIONAL STATISTICAL CLASSIFICATION OF DISEASES AND RELATED HEALTH PROBLEMS.
They are requiring more conversion by more healthcare companies, and smaller ones, to electronic claims and payments processing and other non-insurance requirements. They are requiring conversion of the electronic diagnosis codes from the ICD-9 list to a new ICD-10 list, with at least ten times more codes.
Look at this number thoughtfully: The ICD-10 requirements include some 68,000 codes for the presumably 68,000 different diagnoses that a doctor might make for a patient. Presumably each healthcare company will have to decide how much to charge for each diagnosis, and possibly negotiate rates with each insurance company separately.
The codes include such idiotic details such “struck by a turtle”, “struck by a sea lion”, “accidental striking against or bumped into by another person, initial encounter”, “headache associated with sexual activity”, ”Pedestrian on foot injured in collision with roller-skater, subsequent encounter.”
Those were found at:
“ICD-10 involves an ‘enormous amount of complexity’”:
http://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/10-most-outlandish-kinds-icd-10-codes
I’ve seen some of the more outlandish ones myself. With all the web pages a search brings up for “ICD-10 ridiculous”, it’s truly hard to tell which ones are made-up and which ones are spoofs. One listed “cat-scratch fever”, a la Ted Nugent song.
This may well create more too-big-to-fail companies. There is a mad rush in the healthcare industry to consolidate. Smaller hospitals are begging for bigger chains to buy them out. I haven’t seen specific reference to it, but I’ll bet this includes a LOT of “non-profit” medical companies selling to “profit-based” chains, or other “non-profit” organizations.
The company I work for is snapping up smaller ones everywhere in the country.
Many in the software industry are calling this “bigger than Y2K”, and I think it is. I worked for a small air conditioning equipment distribution company at that time, and changed something like over 600 tables, 1200 “views”, and 1,800 programs. This may affect more. It most certainly has involved LOTS and LOTS of typing and editing and changing going on. Every affected company, corporation and partnership affected, has to finish its own preparation enough to set up test environments so they can jointly test with EVERY other organization they do related business with.
One writer says it will cost trillions of dollars in costs to the medical industry. At my small-ish employer, it is reasonable to say it likely costs millions of dollars in developer pay, and pay for medical diagnosis coders time, and their training, plus all the accounting that goes into the use of the equipment and executives’ time. And all the extra personnel needed to both make the transition, and now the ongoing increase in costs associated with this crazy mess of codes and the multiplication of both human and programming mistakes.
See, this is the problem when people believe that a government can do better than God in sorting things out and taking care of people.
It will never be known how many people will suffer because of so many resources and so much time wasted on obeying government commands to comply with rules that bureaucrats make to justify their salaries, thinking they are helping people.
It’s not just skyrocketing medical costs that will result from this abominable law. It is the resources that are wasted in making life easier for government officials and politicians and giving them yet more socialized control over the lives of individuals. It’s easy to cry foul when a cop shoots a man in cold blood caught on video. It’s not so easy to consider the unemployed teens and unskilled poor who are locked out of the labor market by minimum wage laws. It’s not so easy to consider the invisible harm done to the sick, elderly, and disabled by laws that pretend to expand healthcare but shrink it. It’s not so easy to see the lost jobs and lost wages for the poor and under-employed that lose out to the increased tax burden imposed on their employers. It’s an easy mark to criticize giant corporate profits, but not so easy to see the way the regulations themselves benefit the biggest corporations and keep smaller competitors down. It’s easy to hear the demagogues complain about greedy corporations, but with a government-compliant big-corporation media, it’s not so easy to see how those same “greedy corporations” benefit the demagogues themselves.
Socialism is a lie. Like a friend once told me who had lived in Russia during the days of the Soviet Union, socialism does not exist, there is no such thing. It’s just a trade of one set of rulers for another one with less pretension. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
But let’s be clear. Obamacare is a bipartisan program. It is an implementation of a “conservative” Heritage Foundation plan published in the 1990s, it is Romney-care writ large, it is Hillary-care recharged. Charged to us, making us foot the bill. Let the refrain sound throughout the land: Obamacare is Hillary’s 1993 plan, Phase One.
“But be not deceived. God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
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