[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 159 (2013), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 4925-4926]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                         BUREAUCRATIC CODESPEAK

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Texas (Mr. Poe) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, let's say I take one of my 10 
grandkids, Barrett Houston, to a basketball game he is playing in. He 
gets hit in the face with a basketball, so we go to the doctor to see 
if his nose is broken. The doctor asks Barrett Houston this question: 
Is this the first time you've been hit in the face with a basketball, 
the second time, or do you have a habit of being hit in the face by a 
basketball? Barrett says, I don't know. Doctor says, I've got to know 
because, you see, I've got this codebook here, and the law requires 
that I make sure I put in the codebook the way you were hurt by the 
basketball and how many times because there are five codes for being 
hit in the face by a basketball. And let's say he doesn't know. Well, 
the doctor has to be accurate in how he diagnoses being hit in the face 
by the basketball or the doctor's in trouble.
  Let's say I take another one of my grandsons, Jackson, to go hunting, 
but he happens to get assaulted by a wild turkey. We go to the doctor, 
and the doctor says, Hey, I've got to know exactly how you were hurt by 
that turkey because there is a code for being assaulted by a turkey for 
the first time. There is a code for being assaulted by the turkey a 
second time.

[[Page 4926]]

There is a different code for being pecked by a turkey rather than 
being bitten by a turkey. There are nine codes. The doctor must get the 
right code or he is in violation of the law about being assaulted by 
that turkey. It seems nine codes for a turkey assault is a bit silly.

                              {time}  1010

  Right now, Mr. Speaker, there are 18,000 of these codes. Doctors must 
be accurate when they fill out the diagnosis of a patient who comes and 
sees them.
  Stay with me, Mr. Speaker.
  Soon, there will be 140,000 of these medical codes that doctors must 
get right or they're in trouble by the Federal Government. The new code 
system is called ICD-10. For example, you're injured at a chicken coop; 
that's code number Y9272. You are injured at an art gallery, you fall 
down; that's Y92250. There are even three new codes for being injured 
when you walk into a lamppost. You walk into a lamppost for the first 
time, that's one code; you walk into a lamppost for the second time, 
that's a different code; you walk into a lamppost habitually, that is 
even a different code. And the doctor must get it right, because he's 
in violation of Federal regulators if he doesn't get it right.
  The doctors I've talked to say this is an expensive distraction from 
treating patients. Well, no kidding. It's red tape, it's bureaucracy, 
and this is what happens when clueless Big Government here in 
Washington starts telling people out in the workplace--doctors and 
patients--what they must do. And when the government intrudes into our 
lives with more regulations, the government continues to make things 
more complicated. It finds problems in every solution.
  Doctors are really in the business of helping the sick and the 
injured and saving lives. Do they really have the time and money to 
translate a complicated 140,000-codebook when they diagnose everything 
that happens? But they don't have a choice. If they miscode, they do 
not get paid. Even more so, they face the threat of being fined by the 
Federal Government.
  There's more. To set up this new 140,000-code philosophy, it's going 
to cost an average single practitioner doctor $80,000. Now, isn't that 
lovely? If it's a practice of 5 to 10 people, that's going to cost that 
practice $250,000 to comply with Federal regulations, the new codebook.
  In my opinion, Mr. Speaker, when regulators go to work every day down 
the street in one of these big office buildings, they sit around a big 
oak table, they pull out their lattes and their iPads and they ask the 
question to each other: ``Who shall we regulate today?'' They type out 
a few regulations and send it out to the fruited plain and the masses. 
They don't care about the cost or the effect or whether the regulations 
make any sense; they just do it anyway. And we have to deal with it.
  These new codes are not going to make one sick person well, but yet 
doctors must comply with these new codes or the code police are going 
to punish them. Doctors want to take care of patients, but the Federal 
Government is forcing 140,000 complicated, unreasonable new codes on 
all of us that are hard to decipher. Maybe we should sequester these 
new codes. Where are those World War II code breakers when we need them 
most?
  And that's just the way it is.

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