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A health-insurance company has announced a large-scale experiment involving consciousness. This is the experiment: if any particular surgical procedure lasted too many minutes, the insurance company will refuse to pay for anesthesia.
The company is Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. On November 1, 2024, the company announced:
“Beginning with claims processed on or after February 1, 2025, Anthem will change how it evaluates billed time on professional claims for anesthesia services (that is, CPT® codes 00100 through 01999). We will utilize the CMS Physician Work Time values to target the number of minutes reported for anesthesia services. Claims submitted with reported time above the established number of minutes will be denied.”
Observers who are not part of the experiment speculate about what it can teach the world. Will surgeons become more time-efficient, and find way to speed up any surgical procedures that seem to be taking too long? Will surgery be performed without anesthetic — or with anesthetic that if effective only during the first minutes of any lengthy procedure? How will patients respond when they awaken to fully experience the later minutes or hours of surgery being performed on them?
The American Society of Anesthesiologists put out a helpful explanation, for the public, of this experiment and its potential benefits. The guide is called “Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield Won’t Pay for the Complete Duration of Anesthesia for Patients’ Surgical Procedures.”
Side benefits of the experiment
This experiment in medical efficiency can be of interest also to two other groups of scholars.
First is consciousness. Philosophers still struggle to understand what exactly consciousness is. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says: “Perhaps no aspect of mind is more familiar or more puzzling than consciousness.”
Second is wokeness. The Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield experiment provides an entirely new meaning for the notion of “wokeness“.
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