Question: North Dakota Subscriber Answer: Medicare includes all "surgical anesthesia" administered by the operating surgeon as part of the surgical package and not a payable service. There are many private, non-Medicare or commercial insurance carriers, however, that will pay for anesthesia blocks but not for topical or local anesthesia. For these carriers, you can separately bill for any anesthesia blocks administered by the operating surgeon. The only code for lidocaine is J2001 (Injection, lidocaine HCl for intravenous infusion, 10 mg). In 2004, CMS deleted J2000 (Injection, lidocaine HCl, 50 cc), which many practices were inaccurately using to bill for injected lidocaine. When coding for Medicare, you cannot consider J2001 the same way, however, because the code descriptor specifies that the physician must administer the lidocaine via an IV infusion to use this code. In fact, the Correct Coding Initiative (CCI) bundles J2001 with many minor procedure codes to specifically prevent you from reporting it with an injection code. Alternative: