By Elisabeth Rosenthal When George Lai of Portland, Oregon, took his toddler son to a pediatrician last summer for a checkup, the doctor noticed a little splinter in the child's palm. 'He must have gotten it between the front door and the car,' Lai later recalled, and the child wasn't complaining. The doctor grabbed a pair of forceps -- aka tweezers -- and pulled out the splinter in 'a second,' Lai said. That brief tug was transformed into a surgical billing code: Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code 10120, 'incision and removal of a foreign body, subcutaneous' -- at a cost of $414.