What scares me is how EASY it is to get personal information about people. I work in a hospital and all day we are constantly calling people to verify patient information on this or that specimen we recieved. I can call any doctors office and get the spelling of a name, birthdate, social, address, phone, insurance, almost anything I want. Do you know how EASY it would be to take someone's identity with all that??? I mean geezus, I have the birthday, social and address- what else do I need??? It bothers me a great deal that social security use is so prevalant here in the US. I can't register a new patient without it, insurance won't pay without it... I don't think it is right. I mean, there is such a problem with identity theft in this country, and yet our social- the key to our identity- is thrown around as some identifer- regardless of what it means.
Social Security numbers have no place in medicine. There should be some better way of tracking insurance then using the one thing I am meant to keep secret from everyone else.
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posted by Legna @ 8:32 AM