See the post on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/provisionalidea.bsky.social/post/3lhujtm2qkc2i
According to many comments, the US government DOES use SQL, and Musk is not understanding much what's going on.
this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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It doesn't. There is no truely unique ID in the US.
Source: myself. Worked on health insurance and it was hell.
It's wild too. I've been in the hospital a lot lately and in addition to a bar-code wristband, every healthcare worker, before doing anything with me (the patient) will ask my full name and either birthday or address and then double-check it against the wrist band. This is to make sure, at every step, that they didn't accidentally swap in some other patient with the same name. (Not so uncommon, lots of men have their father's name.)
Meanwhile in like Iceland, everyone gets assigned a personal GPG key at birth so you can just present you public cert as identification, not to mention send private messages and secure your state-assigned crypto-wallet. Not saying such a system is without flaw but it seems a lot better than what we're doing!
This is the first I've heard something like that about Iceland; but I do know a little bit about Icelandic personal ID numbers.