The complexity has everything to do with the nature of politicians, committees, regulators, lobbyists and insurance companies. Put them all together, let them fight and dance for over 50 years, and try to live with the result.
Have you ever heard the old chestnut that “a camel is just a horse, created by committee”?
Take that core idea, times fifty years, divided by political ideology, raised to the power of lobbyists, then cubed by the force of political contributions. What you get is a ridiculously shredded framework of illogical rules, overlapping regulatory fiefdoms, and incomprehensible deadlines, penalties, and acronyms.
It results in so many examples of silliness. We will only pick on one, to get you smiling:
Someone came up with a great core idea — Medicare cards should not have a citizen’s social security number on them, as they do now, because, you know, identity theft.
So they passed the idea around, through numerous committees and roundtables, for years. They finally came up with a plan, then took several years announcing it to enrollees, “Your Medicare number is about to Change!”
They did physical snail-mailings to every Medicare member, repeatedly, advising of the upcoming change. Plus monthly emails, for over a year.
As we write this, we see the announcement of format, with, again, the breathless warning that a change is imminent.
Here’s what the wizards of the distilled committees came up with:
Your 9-digit social security number, plus 1 letter, well known by all of us, is going to become an 11-digit, randomly assigned, alphanumeric designator, like:
1AB2-CD3-EF45
Yep, seriously. That will now identify you within the system. And it will obviously be so easy for you to remember.
Why did they make it so complicated? Because they are Medicare!
9 digits plus a letter only gives 2.6 billion possible combinations. Clearly not enough for a nation of 328 million!
Because, you know, we just have to get ready for the future! So let’s get a system capable of no less than
131,621,700,000,000,000 members.
Because, like, y’know, we have to think ahead. And those retirees, they’ll just have to adapt. No biggie.
