I had a recent conversation with a friend who gave an exhaustive, blow-by-blow description of her recent encounter with the best health care system in the world — it was bad, very bad — and she pointed out to me that while I’ve written in some detail on ObamaCare and health insurance companies, I haven’t really ever taken a look at doctors and hospitals, and they’re also part of the problem. But those are big topics; health care was, after all, 17.1% of GDP in 2014 (13.1% in 1995).
So I thought I would try to limit my scope, and take a look at medical coding, partly because I know something of taxonomies, but also because the medical coding dataflow unites patients, providers (doctors, hospitals), and payers (health insurance companies, and government), so medical coding is a vantage point from which to view the entire horrid, lethal system.
First, I’ll refresh readers’ memories on phishing equilibria, then provide with a potted history of medical coding, including a classification of medical coding errors (?) in the United States today, examine consumer-driven (non-)solutions to fix coding errors, and conclude.
– Naked Capitalism