Santa Baby

Dear Santa:

I hope you and the elves are doing well. I saw a few elves at dinner the other night. Frankly, they were tanked and I hope that doesn’t impede progress in the North Pole.

But, in case it does, I am humbly preparing a list that doesn’t require a bunch of drunken elves to deliver; not to mention an antiquated sleigh that apparently is not equipped with GPS. I refer to the time you brought the kitten I wanted to the neighbors and I got stuck with the Easy Bake Oven with a stupid light bulb instead of gas to provide heat.

But now, fat man in red, I am giving you the opportunity to make up for the lame Easy Bake Oven by bringing me a new set of coding guidelines for home health. I want a coding system with random assignment of codes. I want a coding procedure that doesn’t have manifestation codes, V-Codes, E-Codes or anything else of the sort. If you ever read the list of E-Codes, you would know how depressing it gets to read all the bad things that can happen to the human body. Such knowledge does not impart the Christmas Spirit you claimed to promote before the Easy Bake Oven fiasco.

And of course, the kitten you gave the neighbors got run over in front of my driveway. Did you forget that? Would you like to make it up?

How about a Home Health Assessment that isn’t so complicated it requires letters and numbers just to get the version straight? The term OASIS conjures up visions of palm trees and beaches and relaxation. It is a sick, sick joke perpetrated on nurses and is about as funny as the kitten being run over in my drive way.

My therapist seems to think I am making progress about the events surrounding your gift of a chemistry set to my brother. The scars are fading and I am once again able to smell sulphur without remembering all my Barbies perishing in the great fire that also took out my Barbie mansion, and the GI Joe tank Ken used for transportation. I still have nightmares about little melted pumps littering the floor of the play room.

I know it would help me with my resentment towards you if only you were able to bring to CMS some common sense about medical billing. Here’s how it should work. You take care of a patient. You see how much it costs to do so. You tack a modest amount on for a profit. You submit the claim. Medicare pays.

How hard is that? It should be easier than watching a little girl spend an entire weekend burying Barbie Dolls in her back yard cemetery that spans over an acre.

And if none of that is possible, then please just bless all of those I know with love and good fortune for the New Year. We will take care of the rest.

julianne