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You won’t read about the International Classification of Disease (ICD) on TMZ or hear it discussed on The View, but it has the potential to be an unpleasant October surprise in the health care world. It is a list of codes that physicians and hospitals use when billing insurance companies. These codes cover all manner of medical diagnoses for diseases, conditions, and injuries. The first version of the ICD appeared in 1946, with periodic revisions since. Six months from now, on October 1, the latest version, the ICD-10, will be implemented in the U.S. We are late to the party,...

Were you hit by a falling kayak? Injured while baking, vacuuming or spending too much time in a deep freeze? Encountered a lamppost for the second time? Were you bitten by a turkey? Never fear, the ICD-10 is here. Starting this October, your doctor will be required to record precisely whether you were bitten or struck by a parrot, macaw, chicken, turkey, or any "other psittacines," or encountered any one of 140,000 other specific medical conditions, injuries or diseases.

Reolubin is one of the country’s 186,000 medical coders who work in the back offices of hospitals. It’s her job to translate doctors’ scribbles into diagnosis codes. Those are sent to insurance companies, which use them to determine how much to pay hospitals for care. With 14,000 codes, ICD-9 seems puny by comparison. The new manual explodes that code set to 68,000 much more granular and detailed terms to define — very exactly and specifically — what ails us. There are different numbers for getting struck or bitten by a turkey (W61.42 or W61.43). There are codes for injuries caused...