Assuming the bill was a mistake, she called the doctor’s office and was told that surgery had indeed occurred — because the skin was broken in the process. Hence surgical CPT code 17110 ...

Absent reform, on it goes. Lai was so angry at being charged more than $400 to pull that splinter out of his child’s hand that he went on a crusade, returning to the dermatologist’s office ...

More and more minor interventions, however, have been rebranded and billed as surgery, for profit. These tiny interventions don't yield huge bills — in the hundreds rather than the thousands of ...

Corlette surmised that the codes employed in the instances mentioned above were intended for rare, complicated cases in which the removal of a splinter or a skin lesion — or 14 of them ...