SGR Can Kicked Down the Road for Another Year With Bonus Item That Delays ICD10 Medical Coding Conversion Also For A Year, CMS Will Have More Time To Test And Debug

This is good news and bad news but the good news we’ll take right now as there won’t be any big administrative billing nightmares as have been experienced in the past.  After the CMS 10 day hold is when that would have kicked in and it is a mess.  So we can be happy about that and who knows when Congress might entertain hiring some Quants who can “model” the repeal of the SGR.  They might as well at some point start keeping up with the insurers who are hiring quants like I’ve never seen.  They are no longer just for Hedge Funds. 

It is pretty bad when that word “math” comes around with financial models and folks tend to run for the hills, but at least this time we didn’t have the usual default topic of Women’s Health run up the flag pole.  I have already kind of figured it out that when laws require a lot of math and financial calculations, they run over to talk abortions.  So again at least we were spared that show this year.  I did watch a few minutes of it and Senator Coburn made some good points about his disgust in not being able to fix the SGR. He got into the math and fake formulas and I like to see that addressed no matter who it is, but it all could not come together today.  That Plos One study is looking more accurate all the time as it states the fear of math gives people “real physical” pain:)

“Algo Duping” – PLOS One Journal Publication Explains Why The Fear of Math Plays a Big Role As One Underlying Reason We All Get Duped And Those Who Don’t Fear Math Take All the Money, Gradually, Using “Mathematical Formulas & Algorithms”

In addition some of the discussion rambled off topic a little bit, not bad stuff but things that need to be talked about too but maybe just not today. So they took the easy road and with the roll out of Healthcare.Gov delaying the ICD10 roll out was probably a no brainer as the Hill is probably not too high on the words “trust me” when it comes to technology decisions from HHS and CMS.  We still have that “Sebelius Syndrome” floating around. 

White House Names Former Microsoft Executive To Head Up Fixing “The Sebelius Syndrome” Plaguing What Ended Up On Healthcare.Gov

She’s not the only who has it either but got the name from so many public blunders when trying to talk about technology and got it somewhat humorously wrong so many times. 

Repeal and Replace Obamacare? Not Hardly From a Technological Standpoint As It Needs a Model-Nobody Wants to Swap Out Old Glitches For New Glitches: Modeling, Virtual Software Worlds and More Importantly Complex IT Infrastructure Reality, Get Hip…

The big thing is with ICD10 is have it work and have plenty of time to test and debug and debug and debug.  It was kind of nuts earlier this year when CMS was not going to test end to end and said the roll out date was firm, so yeah we heard that one before with Healthcare.Gov and there’s still issues.  This way too if there happens to be any code that has not been completed yet, they have time.  The ICD10 add on was not really discussed and was just put there so I don’t that was an issue with either side to agree on it.  Sure there has been a lot of money spent I recognize that but if a delay means better preparedness and roll out, so be it with the complex IT Infrastructures out there.  In the House we had this and tacked on 5 years for the insurance penalty of the ACA.  Who knows that could still happen somewhere else. 

ICD10 software and coding is nothing more than rolling out a whole new set of algorithms that have to play with the ones we currently have, its all computer code and data mechanics. 

House Passes Doctor SGR Bill With Conditions, Five Year Stall on Mandating Penalties For Individuals Not Buying Health Insurance - Why Not At Hold Off of Penalties (But Less Than Five Years) As Many Other Items In the ACA Are Getting Extended…

So why didn’t we do ICD10 when everyone had their data in silos (grin), I just had to say that:)  Long and short here the Hill just doesn’t want to do math and hire some Quants to model it for them.  Again I have beat the horse to death with so many posts about Congress getting that Office of Technology Assessment to help them with some of this.  It’s going to smack them in the face sooner or later as you can’t just focus on verbiage anymore, need to tie in the technology with some digital centric laws spelling a few things out. 

Medicare SGR Formula To Cut Medicare Payments to Doctors, When Will Congress, CMS, HHS And A Few Others Learn How To Model and Fix And/Or Replace It? This Is Math, Like The Quants Build All The Time At Banks, Hedge Funds And Insurance Companies..

Again I do have to say though that Tom Coburn was on the money today with addressing the fact that this has not been fixed and has needed a fix since 1999.  BD