At 03:47 AM 6/11/2001 +0000, Dr. Evil wrote:
I need to sign up for health insurance tomorrow. I'm going to buy individual coverage from Kaiser. On their form, it asks for an SSN, of course.
Well, Kaiser is not a government agency, and is certainly not associated with the Social Security Adminisrtation in any way, so they have no legitimate need for my SSN, and I don't want to give it to them. I'm wondering how best to go about doing this:
I've had pretty good luck, when dealing with private and some governmental organizations, with the following - "I don't give out my SSN for privacy reasons." sometimes adding, "Could you assign me a new number to use within your organization?" or "I have a nine digit number I use instead of an SSN, can I use that instead?" In particular, the latter is helpful where the person I'm talking to doesn't personally care what they enter, but the computer system or local policy is that a nine-digit number MUST be entered (or used as a database key), and they're not allowed to just make up numbers themselves. We can complete the transaction - I haven't lied nor committed fraud, they're not in trouble with their boss, and everyone's happy. There's no particular reason the nine-digit number you supply needs to be the same when you deal with different organizations, so you're limiting their ability to cross-link databases using that field. If they've got full name, date of birth, and address, they probably don't need an SSN to cross-link, it just saves some programmer and computer time. Kaiser assigns an internal "member number" which isn't your SSN for use within their system - but that's no reason to give them the SSN in the first place. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@well.com "Organized crime is the price we pay for organization." -- Raymond Chandler