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Not PD related, but having been in several hospitals and medical facilities lately I find their insistance on copying DL and insurance cards a little disturbing.

Most recently I was going in for surgery and the young lady at the reception desk asked for my cards, and then stood up and walked away with them.

I told her she was not going to leave my sight with my cards and she got pretty defensive right away: "You HAVE to understand . . .It's policy, I MUST make a copy" and other stuff. I told her that was fine and dandy, but she HAD to understand that my policy was not to allow my cards out of my sight, and that if she wanted me to accompany her to wherever she was going with my cards, that would be fine. She eventually relented and blocked the door to the room with the copy machine open so I could see her.

Then when she returned she did not immediately hand them back to me, but paper clipped them to my file folder. She started to give me flack when I asked for them back, but then did so, stating the the next person would be needing to see them. I told her that the next person could ask for them and I would present them, but that since she had just placed copies of them in the file there was no need for them to be attached.

Previous visit to a different facility a few months back, the girl asked if she could "see" them, and then tried to take them out of my hand, and I gave her flack for trying to take them when all she wasked was to see them, did she see with her fingers?

All of this was enendered by a hospitalization a while back, where they asked to "see" my cards, and then took them, out of my sight, elsewhere to be copied. In the meantime the triage nurse saw me, and I was placed on a gurney and moved to a room.

When I started asking for my license and insurance card back they first denied having taken them, and then said they had returned them, and then they couldn't find them. They had been left on the copy machine and the next person to use it had taken them off and put them somewhere.

It took more than an hour, and yelling at administrators to even get someone to look for them, while they told me it was no big deal and that they would give me a note to present to the police if I was stopped with no license. The person who took them had gone off shift and I eventually badgered them into calling her at home. and she was sure se returned them to me.

When they were found, even while another administrator denied that they had them, they were on the desk of the person who had left, under a file for a different patient, a fact that the person who found them was trying to communicate to the administrator who was denying that they had them, without me overhearing.

I did overhear and I told them that that would have been the first place I would have looked after the copy machine and that they were incompetent.