HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Know someone who drowned from jumping off burning water skis? Well, there’s a new medical billing code for that. Been injured in a spacecraft? There’s a new code for that, too. Roughed up by an Orca whale? It’s on the list. Next fall, a transformation is coming to the arcane world of medical billing. Overnight, virtually the entire health care system — Medicare, Medicaid, private insurers, hospitals, doctors and various middlemen — will switch to a new set of computerized codes used for determining what ailments patients have and how much they and their insurers should pay. Technology specialists fear major disruptions to health care delivery if the new coding system — heavily computer-reliant — isn’t put in place properly.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: More than 975,000 people signed up for health insurance through the federal exchange between Dec. 1 and Dec. 24, the deadline to enrollment to be covered by Jan. 1, the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a blog item posted today. Marilynn Tavenner, the CMS administrator, wrote that 1.1 million Americans have enrolled in insurance through the exchange since it opened Oct. 1.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: The chocolate-chip cookie celebrated its 75th birthday this year. ... The beauty of the chocolate-chip cookie—and no small part of its enduring popularity—is its flexibility. You can make it with shortening, margarine, or butter; you can make big cookies or small cookies; you can use pecans or walnuts or M. & M.’s or peanut butter; you can use more brown sugar or less; ... It doesn't matter. What comes out will still be recognizable as a chocolate-chip cookie and, most likely, it will taste good.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: He won't use it, and he didn't actually sign up for it himself, but President Barack Obama has enrolled for health coverage through the new insurance exchanges. Announcing his enrollment Monday, the White House called it a symbolic show of Obama's support for the fledgling exchanges where millions of Americans must buy insurance or face a penalty.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: A record-setting crush of last-minute shoppers descended on HealthCare.gov on Monday, creating long wait times for users and putting new stress on the government’s much-maligned health portal as they raced against a midnight deadline to sign up for coverage that will go into effect on Jan. 1. 

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Kurt DelBene, who previously was president of the Microsoft Office Division, was named by President Barack Obama to replace Jeffrey D. Zients and oversee efforts to rescue the federal government's health care website.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Americans who already have health insurance are blaming President Barack Obama's health care overhaul for their rising premiums and deductibles, and overall 3 in 4 say the rollout of coverage for the uninsured has gone poorly. An AP poll finds that health care remains politically charged going into next year's congressional elections. ... In the survey, nearly half of those with job-based or other private coverage say their policies will be changing next year — mostly for the worse.

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday put in place a major new policy to phase out the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in cows, pigs and chickens raised for meat, a practice that experts say has endangered human health by fueling the growing epidemic of antibiotic resistance. This is the agency’s first serious attempt in decades to curb what experts have long regarded as the systematic overuse of antibiotics in healthy farm animals, with the drugs typically added directly into their feed and water. 

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: Lawmakers have all but given up on efforts to permanently replace the Medicare physician payment formula this year and have refocused their effort on getting it done in 2014. Both the Senate Finance and the House Ways and Means committees are expected to vote next week on a proposal that would permanently repeal the Sustainable Growth Rate and establish a new formula for paying doctors and hospitals that treat Medicare patients. It's a rare bipartisan, bicameral approach that would forever eliminate the need for the universally hated annual "doc fix".

HCR Update from Mark Sanna: HealthCare.gov web pages now load in less than a second, down from eight seconds in late October. The system now operates more than 90% of the time. For some weeks in October, the site was up for only 40% of the time. And the average rate of time-outs or other Web-page failures on the site has dropped to around three-quarters of a percent. It was as high as 6% in October.