You honestly think there are 10s of millions of people wanting a decongestant in the United States without ID? This is ridiculous and I agree with the other commenter, a bit hyperbolic.
Wow I was surprised by this figure, so I tried to find the source everyone quotes. It appears to be a 2006 telephone survey of 987 randomly-selected voting age citizens that were then weighted for an underrepresentation of race (so perhaps not that accurate). Anecdotally, I work in a safety net hospital and it is really rare for someone to come in without ID, which is why those numbers seemed so surprising to me...
Pretending that government IDs are super duper hard to give out is a time-honored American tradition.
After all, imagine if the government had a database with every person's name in it! You'd have like 300 million rows? Nobody's built a computing machine that could do that. And then how would you get the cards to people? You'd have to send out horses and buggies to every corner of the nation. And where would you find enough coachmen to do that, and roads to drive the coaches on???
No, clearly it's unpossible.
So we have to reserve the use of government IDs for really important things, like checking if you can buy cold medicine, and voting must remain insecure.
Government IDs are not a solved problem, and you don't seem to have even tried to consider the issues involved. The key distinction between voting and cold medicine is that you have a right to vote, but not to buy cold medicine. So if you lost your ID, or it's expired, it is not an option to just say "that sucks, I guess you can't vote now".
In fact, as a rule, ID is reserved for things that aren't important, because it is a point of failure.
I think these basic facts should be taught in school. Yes, millions don't have ID.
It seems trite to someone in the middle class, but it genuinely is not a priority to certain demographics, given the challenge of getting it. That challenge may seem trivial to a frequenter of Hacker News, but we're a diverse society.
The only barrier to getting a decongestant should be: having the money to pay for it.
No, but why the hell should someone else’s misbehavior cost me time and inconvenience?
The cost of these regulations is millions, perhaps billions of dollars in extra effort, bookkeeping and security by tens of thousands of businesses, not to mention lost productivity and frustration on the part of everyone else evolved, and moats of the costs and inconvenience is borne by people outside the government, who are not committing a crime.
It’s bat shit crazy that bureaucrats are allowed to steal this much productivity from the economy.
I honestly think it's on that order, yes. Anyone who has had a respiratory infection, a sinus headache, or seasonal allergies. Anyone who would take NyQuil. Over the course of 18 years. Why is that so hard to believe? In fact, now that I think about it more, it's probably a lot more.
https://bluenotary.us/how-many-american-citizens-don-t-have-...