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'Ridiculous': Doctor charges for surgery after pulling splinter from toddler's hand (www.rawstory.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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When George Lai of Portland, Oregon, took his toddler son to a pediatrician last summer for a checkup, the doctor noticed a little splinter in the child’s palm. “He must have gotten it between the front door and the car,” Lai later recalled, and the child wasn’t complaining. The doctor grabbed a pair of forceps — aka tweezers — and pulled out the splinter in “a second,” Lai said. That brief tug was transformed into a surgical billing code: Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code 10120, “incision and removal of a foreign body, subcutaneous” — at a cost of $414.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The wart story in the article is even worse than the splinter one. Ointment counts as surgery because the ointment penetrates the skin. That'll be $495, please.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

According to their norms, I'm apparently I'm an experienced surgeon myself.