Quote:
Originally Posted by gasman
Is that a real problem? Does the cost of fraudulent cards actually amount to enough to warrant a more secure card.
I haven't shown my actual card in over two years, just read them the number from the picture on my phone. If fraud is such a concern, wouldn't they at least implement a system to check the actual cards as is today?
I can guess exactly how a government driven app would go. Millions of dollars for a sub standard, buggy platform.
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You'd also save the cost of mailing and printing these cards, similar to how they save by having one license plate instead of two. Not to mention the redundancy of having two seperate databases for something like your driver's license and your health card, no reason they can't be just one.
I think articles on it so far are poorly worded as well. People more familiar with the AP are saying the digital thing is something for the future and the first step is just making the drivers license and health card one card.
But on the fraud, there's been two auditor general reports on it. In 2004 it was estimated up to 80 million a year could be lost from it. In 2015 there was another report that likened the cards to a credit card with limit and suggested at least having them expire but that got axed last spring.
There's also been issues of people from Montana coming up to use the free healthcare. Communities near the US border report having more health care cards on file than people living near there.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada...-alberta-great
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmon...neral-1.509819
And something on health care fraud in general
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3537805/
I read another article earlier as well (that of course I can't find now) that suggested some links between Alberta health card technology being the oldest in Canada, and the fact that Alberta spends the most per person on health care in Canada. It touched on some of these points as well, but was mostly just hypothesis I believe