392: Someone Else's Money

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Note: This American Life is produced for the ear and designed to be heard. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis that's not on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Here's how it works. You're a doctor, you help some patient, and you want to get paid for it. So you have to choose a code that describes what you did to put on the insurance form. And it's an arcane language of its own, with tens of thousands of codes. And just make things more confusing, every insurance company interprets the codes differently. So even a simple procedure, the simplest procedure, giving somebody a shot, can become fantastically complex if you want to be reimbursed for it by insurance. Take the new swine flu vaccine. The American Academy of Family Physicians put out a guide for physician

Full episode Toggle Audio and Transcript Sync Prologue Ira Glass Here's how it works. You're a doctor, you help some patient, and you want to get paid for it. So you have to choose a code that describes what you did to put on the insurance form. And it's an arcane language of its own, with tens of thousands of codes. And just make things more confusing, every insurance company interprets the codes differently. So even a simple procedure, the simplest procedure, giving somebody a shot, can become fantastically complex if you want to be reimbursed for it by insurance. Take the new swine flu vacc

392: Someone Else's Money

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