When I dislocated my kneecap on the baseball field, the emergency room doc in New London, Conn., literally laughed at my pain as he popped my knee back into place in a crowded hallway with no anesthetic.

When my daughter dislocated her kneecap while sporting around decades later, the ER doc in Fresno ensured she was absolutely giggling with pain meds before he realigned her knee.

I couldn't tell you what those docs charged my insurers for their respective talents, but the byzantine world of hospital billing is about to get even more bizarre.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is unleashing a new coding system that will cost health care providers billions, increase billing errors by as much as 25% and require docs to demand more information from patients. The change is supposed to assist in tracking new diseases and, in the long run, force care-givers to adopt a national electronic medical-records system.

Translation: the current system that has five codes to describe a sprained ankle will grow to 45 codes, adding such specificity as which ankle and was it ever previously injured. Currently, there is one code for angioplasty, the clearing of a blocked blood vessel, the paper reports. The number of codes for that will climb to -- get this -- 1,170.

Even hospital administrators who got "A" in accounting have trouble swimming in the jargon bowl of relative value units (RVUs), international classification of diseases (ICD),  current procedural terminology (CPT) and the trusty DRG -- diagnosis-related group.

The new system will increase the number of codes tenfold -- to 155,000. Care-givers apparently can still check a diagnosis box that says "unspecified" -- but I imagine that will be greeted with the same kind of scream I delivered in the ER.