Against simple universal health-care identifiers.

Medical records are becoming fully computerized; technical, administrative and economic forces are pushing toward standardization on a single identifier, such as the Social Security Number (SSN) to index all records; consequently, the privacy and security of our medical histories will be severely compromised. We argue that there are sensible and effective technological means available to reduce the risks of such compromise, and that it is time to design the characteristics we want of our record-keeping systems rather than to fall into the problems caused by unthinking adoption of an overly simplistic approach.