The beak of a parrot can pack 500-700 pounds of pressure per square inch. What happens if it’s your finger in that vice instead of the usual Brazil nut? Hint: paperwork.
Sara Kliff of the Washington Post explains how insurance companies keep track of this kind of injury, and every other concievable mishap, using a system called the International Classification of Diseases:
That’s insurance-speak for the Tenth Edition of the International Classification of Diseases, a laundry list of thousands of billing codes that health insurance plans use to categorize various medical conditions. Get injured by a flaming water-ski? There’s an ICD-10 code for that. Have an unfortunate encounter with a parrot? ICD-10 has not one but nine codes to categorize parrot-related injuries (“W61.01” refers to being “bitten by a parrot” while W61.02 denotes being “struck by a parrot.”)
Right now, the medical billing world uses the ninth edition of the ICD, or ICD-9, which has about 18,000 codes. When it flips to ICD-10, that number will swell to 140,000 billing codes. The federal government was initially set to require the health-care industry to switch to ICD-10 by Oct. 1, 2013. But after intense lobbying, especially from the American Medical Association, Health and Human Services announced this week that it would delay implementation.
Right now, the insurance industry is using ICD-9, which has 18,000 billing codes. The federal government initially ordered the industry to upgrade to the 140,000-code ICD-10 system by October of 2013. However, the government backed off in the face of intensive lobbying from the American Medical Association and other interest groups.
Interestingly, the lobbying for ICD-10 comes from interest groups who want to use the codes for research. It would be interesting to know how their research interests influence the granularity of codes.
If there are nine codes for parrot-related injuries alone, how can everything else that could possibly go wrong with the human body fit into a mere 140,000 codes? If every animal that could injure humans gets 9 codes, won’t they run out of codes before they even get around to enumerating all the different kinds asthma and arthritis?
Is the Cat Lobby pushing for extra parrot-related codes to make the avian competition look bad?
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