Social Security Numbers and health insurance

[Greg Broiles]

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 at well.com
"Organized crime is the price we pay for organization." -- Raymond Chandler