The government is here to help

If you go to the doctor or a hospital today, your health care provider must choose one of 18,000 codes to describe your complaint. How anyone can sort through 18,000 choices is beyond me, but it's about to get better, or much worse: Washington has dictated a new set of codes to the tune of 140,000 of the little alphanumeric cuties. Among them: walking into a lamp post: "initial encounter" (W22.02XA) and walking into a lamp post: "subsequent encounter" (W22.02XD).

How many jobs will that "create or save"? Blue skies! -- Dan Ford