{"id":1598,"date":"2008-04-15T16:10:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-15T22:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/15\/privacy-2\/"},"modified":"2011-05-09T15:23:16","modified_gmt":"2011-05-09T21:23:16","slug":"privacy-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/privacy-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Privacy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally published at Kickin’ the new Kuh-nowledge<\/a>. You can comment here or there<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Received a letter from the powers that be at work.\u00a0 They will be doing an audit of health insurance beneficiaries to verify that the people employees list as dependents are actually…\u00a0 well… you know…\u00a0 dependents.\u00a0 It’s a way to save money, and I totally get that.<\/p>\n

However, they’ve hired an outside auditing firm to do the checking for them.\u00a0 Where it gets really interesting is the part where we receive a letter in the mail that basically says.\u00a0 Send proof of your status or we will turn off your health insurance.\u00a0 If you’re married, you need to send a copy of your marriage certificate.\u00a0 If you have kids, you need to send copies of birth certificates.<\/p>\n

It was at that point that I said…\u00a0 Whu????\u00a0 You want me to send a copy of my marriage cert to some unknown third party?\u00a0 Wouldn’t it make better sense for me to bring in a copy of the cert… show it to my boss and sign an affidavit of some sort?\u00a0 Why on earth would I send it to some company I have no prior relationship with (heck, I doubt I would even send it to companies that I “trust”).<\/p>\n

The response from my HR department is that these things are public records and readily obtainable by anyone.\u00a0 My response, is, of course, if they are readily obtainable by anyone then why are you asking me to send them to this third party?\u00a0 Shouldn’t the third party be able to…\u00a0 well…\u00a0 you know… obtain them without me being involved.<\/p>\n

The reason why this argument falls flat on its face is that even though these records are obtainable, they aren’t readily obtainable.\u00a0 It costs money to have the state send you a copy of some public record.\u00a0 That is the check that state agencies put on just anybody asking for these things.\u00a0 The idea being that forcing people to pay for these things is enough of a deterrent on just anybody grabbing these things up.\u00a0 It’s not perfect, but there you have it.<\/p>\n

Let’s be clear…\u00a0 it’s not like I have a choice in the matter.\u00a0 It’s not like I’m going to fight it on principle while they pull the plug on my wife’s health insurance.\u00a0 The funniest part of this whole thing for me was when they told me, “We’ve hired this third party for YOUR privacy.”\u00a0 Say what?\u00a0 Laughable, I know.<\/p>\n

As I told my HR folks…\u00a0 I’m sure we’ll all have a laugh when the cost of this auditing firm is added to the list of reasons our health insurance goes up next year.<\/p>\n

–sam<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published at Kickin’ the new Kuh-nowledge. You can comment here or there. Received a letter from the powers that be at work.\u00a0 They will be doing an audit of health insurance beneficiaries to verify that the people employees list as dependents are actually…\u00a0 well… you know…\u00a0 dependents.\u00a0 It’s a way to save money, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[26,151],"class_list":["post-1598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work","tag-health-insurance","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1598"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1891,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions\/1891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lalato.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}