Sick care in America: 70,000 ways for doctors to bill the government for your diseases and symptoms

Tuesday, January 05, 2016 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: healthcare, ICD-10 codes, rising costs

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(NaturalNews) If you've ever doubted the fact that conventional healthcare is an unsustainable financial behemoth, consider the new rules developed for doctors and healthcare practitioners that provision billing schemes for some 70,000 different sicknesses and disease symptoms – practically none of which involve prevention through nutrition or herbal therapies.

According to reports, all healthcare providers operating within the U.S. will now be required to use an international coding system known as ICD-10, which contains 70,000 unique codes for billing Obamacare on the taxpayers' dime. These codes cover all sorts of wild scenarios, including the cost associated with treatment for someone who gets bitten by a parrot.

Adding fuel to the fire of America's already skyrocketing $2.9 trillion-a-year healthcare system, the ICD-10 billing requirements will make it easier than ever for doctors to bilk the system for alleged health conditions such as "Problems in relationship with in-laws" or "Burn due to water skis on fire."

The adoption of ICD-10 codes replaces the former ICD-9 coding system, which is now officially retired. And despite this transition to the new system, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), whose job it is to track such numbers, says it has no idea what the total cost will be for the change.

"Little is known," stated the GAO in an August report, about the total financial burden associated with the ICD-10 adoption.

"Beyond the estimated costs reported by CMS [the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services], little is known about the costs that providers, clearinghouses, and insurers incurred for updating their Medicare claims submission systems," the report states.

"Such costs were not identified by the professional associations we contacted or by industry studies that we reviewed."

Healthcare is the single biggest drain on American taxpayers – that and constant war overseas!

HCA Holdings Inc., a Nashville, Tennessee-based hospital chain, identified its costs just for the year 2015, and the total came out to about $30 million, according to Bloomberg. And many other hospital groups across the nation will likely report similar figures in the coming months.

At a time when healthcare is at a premium – think massive increases in monthly premiums as a result of Obamacare – the adoption of a whole new set of billing codes for ridiculous scenarios like getting sucked into a jet engine hardly seem prudent. Chalk it all up to more government irrationality and waste in this time of societal collapse.

And yet, there's still considerable doubt about whether ICD-10 will even be fully implemented as planned. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has repeatedly postponed its implementation, and some contend that based on the reality of how many times this agency has kicked the can down the road, so to speak, it's an inevitable failure and waste of government resources.

"ICD-10 will never happen," stated one health system CIO to a colleague at the College of Health Information Management Executives (CHIME) gathering, according to Government Health IT.

ICD-10 was supposed to be fully implemented in 2011, but this got postponed to 2013, and then to 2014. It is still pending as a comprehensive industry standard to this day. And the reason, of course, is mostly due to costs – costs for doctors, costs for insurers, and costs for taxpayers.

"ICD-10 won't happen," wrote one Government Health IT commenter. "It would put too many providers out of business."

Sources for this article include:

Bloomberg.com

GAO.gov^[PDF]

GovHealthIT.com