Political Quotes

“Mr. President, this amendment is very controversial, I know, amongst my colleagues. But I have practiced medicine for 25 years, and before that I ran a pretty successful business. The Department of Health and Human Services delayed the implementation of ICD-10. Let me explain what that is. ICD-10 is a new diagnostic code book. Why is that important? Well, we use ICD-9 now, which helps us write the diagnostic codes. Whether you are in a hospital, a clinic, a doctor's office, an outpatient surgery center, a home health, whatever it is, those diagnostic codes categorize what we actually did for you. Well-intentioned public health experts thought we aren't broad enough in what we do with the ICD-9, International Classification of Diseases, so as a part of the Affordable Care Act, ICD-10 was implemented. There is nothing wrong with updating it, but let me explain to you what we did. We went from 18,000 codes of diseases to 140,000 codes, the cost of which, at a minimum, in the health care system under various studies will be at least $5 billion a year in added costs. Will there be some benefit? Yes, to the public health experts who study disease patterns there will be some limited benefit. The question we have to ask is, What is our biggest problem with health care? Our biggest problem with health care is it costs too much. What we have done with ICD-10 is, just the implementation--I am talking $5 billion a year from here on.…”