On the contrary. You fail to see, they weren’t trying to prevent all fraud, they were merely seeing to it that no fraud could be committed from those quarters! Get it? :dubious:
I get it, but I also think it’s much ado about nothing, but okay! Apparently I’m in the minority. Let’s all go around superscared about giving our information to any doctor’s office, because it’s OBVIOUSLY all fraud/ID theft waiting to happen.
Two maxims apply here:
[ul]
[li]Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me.[/li][li]Once burned, twice shy.[/li][/ul]
Well, that’s how you feel. Whether I would feel that way, or you would feel that way doesn’t matter. At least you could admit that they have a valid point, without the tsk tsking and eye rolling you’ve been doing.
You seem to be missing the points which appear obvious to many of us:
The doctor’s office had no legitimate reason to keep the papers. None.
The customer’s request, while perhaps unusual, was not unreasonable.
Retrieval of the papers was not a huge, system-disrupting burden. These people spent a lot more time and energy stonewalling and resisting than it took to simply honor the request.
It doesn’t matter why the customer wanted those papers, there was NO GOOD REASON to not return them.
That should settle it right there. Moving beyond that, though, in this case, the lengths to which the doctor went to avoid returning the papers strongly suggest some nefarious intent. Seeing no legitimate reason for such behavior leads one to suspect an illegitimate one.
Indeed. And the reluctance to honor a reasonable request (while presenting no valid reason for retaining the records) is itself illegitimate.
Let’s work backwards here, shall we? I believe implying that I am somehow unbalanced (get a hold of yourself?) is an insult. One not warranted in IMHO. What I stated was merely an observation that you have shown you do firmly have a grip on yourself.
Next point, I think you really need to stop trying to put word in other poster’s post. “just because it happened to me” is not the reason it looks like fraud. As has been pointed out to you repeatedly, it was the fact that this woman had to threaten to call the police before this doctor would return her information. Information that he had absolutely no valid reason to keep. A credit card company has a reason to keep my information if I apply for a card with them, the DOD, the DOT, all those places have valid reasons – a doctor to whom I will not be visiting does not.
If you have a problem with me, take it to the pit, otherwise, keep your petty insults to yourself.
Also, the day that she gave them the papers, they are just that – papers – not yet entered into the computer system.
After data-entry it’s another story. Demanding your papers back a week later would, I agree, be a largely empty gesture, as computer records are much harder to reliably sanitize; but doing so before the records have been computerized would seem to offer some level of protection, IMHO.
Sailboat
This is an unfounded assumption, IMHO. I simply called it as such. That’s not an insult, but from the information they gave, you jump immediately to “sounds like fraud” and advise them to report the doctor to their insurance company.
This sort of attitude just reinforces paranoia. It doesn’t “sound like” fraud. It “sounds like” idiot doctors/filers who see letting information walk out the door as letting their prospective patient walk out the door. TO jump completely to assuming/acting upon the worst is absurd. And that’s not an insult. I’m attacking your idea, not YOU. There is a big difference.
You’re missing the point. There isn’t a need for the doctor to retain the papers. She was never treated, she didn’t intend to go back. Your later point about it being more work if she went back also misses the point in that filling out forms would be work for her and not them.
I have issues with institutions which had assine “policies” and I would have done the same thing there.