Charles Murray over at the Enterprise Blog:
As a senior citizen, I am privy to arcana that you youngsters are not. Namely, I recently obtained my very own personal Medicare card. Listen up.
Your wallet is stuffed with sturdy plastic credit cards or laminated identification cards, many with photographs and lots of encoded data. Even the basic cards you might get from your county (library card) or state (driver’s license) are probably close to state-of-the-art. You want to know what a Medicare identification card is like? It is a little larger than the standard size for credit cards and driver’s licenses. (Of course. Couldn’t have the federal government make a card that will fit in a stack with all the other cards you use.) It has no magnetic strip. It is plain vanilla text and fonts—no security features whatsoever. It could be counterfeited by a sixth-grader with a scanner. It is made out of flimsy paper that would barely qualify for a really cheap business card. This, for Medicare benefits, for Pete’s sake. It’s pathetic.
Actually, it is shoddy and incompetent, as are so many things that the federal government does.