Two More Years

2

The AMA is actually trying to be useful again.  Go figure. Their House of Delegates recently voted to lobby lawmakers and CMS for a two-year grace period to avoid complying with the ICD-10 transition deadline in October 2014.   If you don’t know, the switch from ICD-9 to ICD-10 code sets means that health care providers and insurers will have to change out about 14,000 codes for about 69,000 codes.   This behemoth of a coding system doesn’t make healthcare better.  It just creates more administrator and statistician jobs all the while giving doctors more clerical work to do.  May I remind you how important it is to correctly code an injury when walking into a lamp post?  By the way, the AMA tried the same thing 2 years ago and it worked.   But why keep trying to delay it?  How about just getting rid of this mess?