[ashark]

Unfortunately, US politics are really weird and unlikely to get better without at least a constitutional amendment or two. We're stuck unable (unwilling...) to avoid all kinds of awful things necessary for participation in a modern economy, but able to squash any government-related approaches to mitigate the awfulness. This includes simple stuff like national ID.

We must have something like unique individual IDs, but a significant faction of political actors don't want it, so nothing official exists. Instead we get terrible, insecure, miserable-to-deal-with, ad hoc, de facto national IDs of various kinds. It's the worst of both worlds—no actual extra freedom, lots of pointless inconvenience, expense, risk, and anxiety. If that last list looks like what our health care system produces, too, that's not an accident—this is the kind of situation our government (and their private partners) excel at creating.