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.
Can I sue for malpractice if my general practitioner is practicing “surgery” while not being a surgeon then?
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.
According to their norms, I'm apparently I'm an experienced surgeon myself.
We need to start stringing these people up and slitting throats if we want change.
if doctors deserve that, then judges and DAs deserve _________
