It never fails to amaze me that every tax and financial document I get displays only the last 4 digits of my Social Security number with the SOLE exception the 1099 I get from the Social Security Administration, which displays my entire number.
And further, Medicare cards also display their holders' entire SSNs, thereby putting seniors, who are most at risk of identity theft, at even greater risk.
Why isn't the government, too, required to protect Americans? (Yes, I've written to my elected officials.
You are probably too young to remember the vigorous debates in congress and in the press when the law was passed prohibiting the use of the social security number for a customer identification number. Medical records and tax records were specifically exempted from that law because of the absolute necessity of having a unique personal identifier. Medicare is NOT exempt from the requirements of that law. However, because of the immense burden and cost of re-issuing Medicare cards and changing all of the medicare health records, they were permitted to get away with adding a code letter to the SSN and saying that was sufficiently different to pass muster under the law. 🤔
At the same time the U.S. military, which prior to that point had its own system of unique identifying numbers, elected to switch to using the SSN with alpha prefix and suffix characters so that like the Medicare numbers it was technically different from the SSN although the SSN is a clearly identifiable component. 🤔🤔
I'm old enough to have ignored those debates as having been inconsequential other than in their ultimate effect on my life.
1. There's absolutely
no reason why a 1099 from the Social Security Administration needs to include your full SSN; they just couldn't be bothered with caring
about the people whom they're supposed to care
for.
2. Granted that reissuing all existing Medicare cards would have been an immense burden, not to mention the fact that the process would have been susceptible to all sorts of glitches that would have messed up people's lives, but I don't see any reason for they're not having made a change on an ongoing basis other than, again, their not having wanted to be bothered.
3. The military is the military, and who's to question military "wisdom"?
