Medicare and SSN

The NY Times reports that Medicare is resisting changing the Medicare card to remove the SSN.

Ms. Frizzera, the Medicare official, said that issuing new Medicare cards would be “a huge undertaking.” The agency would need three years to plan such a move and eight more years to carry it out, she said.

Medicare officials estimate that it would cost $500 million to change their computer systems if they issued new ID numbers to beneficiaries. Doctors, hospitals and other health care providers use those numbers in filing claims with Medicare, which pays a billion claims a year.

I regard this with the disdain it deserves. The state of Virginia has phased out SSN's as the drivers license number. I recognize that Medicare is not used to issuing new cards every 5 years or so, but I assume they have procedures for replacing lost or stolen cards. And they have procedures for handling erroneous numbers (i.e., if they give out a card with the wrong number they're able to reissue a new card with the right number). Those two capabilities can be the basis for the changeover because they supply the business logic for the change. The third and missing element is a process to generate a unique 9-digit number for Medicare recipients. All they need is a cross-reference file matching their number to the SSN. Match all bills against the file so the provider can bill using either the SSN, if already in the provider's database, or the Medicare number.

The bottom line is, they're going to have to do it someday, might as well do it now.