On Monday, several news outlets highlighted comments that Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) made to the Iowa Republican Party earlier this month in which he mocked an Obamacare provision for being burdensome and silly. Paul ridiculed the health law for forcing doctors to use 122,000 new medical diagnostic codes for describing Americans’ injuries to the government, including for “injuries sustained from a turtle” and “walking into a lamppost.”
The new codes do, admittedly, exist. There’s just one problem with Paul’s claims — they were adopted by the George W. Bush administration, long before Obamacare was even being debated.
Paul is referring to the transition from the ICD-9 — the current system of medical code classifications that originated from the World Health Organization (WHO) — to the far more detailed ICD-10. That’s a change that was mandated by the Bush White House in its waning days and is reflective of changing international standards for coding care. Many countries have been using the updated codes for over a decade.
It was a petty and banal criticism anyway….and yet it still missed the mark. For some reason I think it’s more his father’s influence (via those awesome newsletters he wrote during Rand’s formative years) than any reality that shapes Paul’s opinion of Obama.
That and his rampant ignorance about how government functions IRL.
Robot Pirate Ninja 