I mean you can make up a lot of different names for an efficiency agency, I’m pretty sure Musk picked the name, as they renamed the Digital Services department to create Doge - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Efficiency

Thanks, OP seemed more curious about the technical aspects than just the absurdity of the comment (since pretty much every business uses SQL) so hoped a more technical explanation might be appreciated.

Sure, basically any time you have a many-to-many relationship you’ll have to repeat keys multiple times. Think students taking courses. You’d have a students table and a courses table, but the relationship is many students take many courses. So you’d want a third table for lookups where each row is [student_id, course_id].

This stackoverflow post has a similar example with authors and books - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13970628/how-do-i-model-a-many-to-many-relation-in-sql-server#13970688

If SSNs are used as a primary key (a unique identifier for a row of data) then they’d have to be duplicated to be able to merge data together.

However, even if they aren’t using ssn as an identifier as it’s sensitive information. It’s not uncommon to repeat data either for speed/performance sake, simplicity in table design, it’s in a lookup table, or you have disconnected tables.

Having a value repeated doesn’t tell you anything about fraud risk, efficency, or really anything. Using it as the primary piece of evidence for a claim isn’t a strong arguement.

You want them to do that regardless of the how the country keeps track of individuals. The point of all that asking is to make sure they have the right patient for the right procedure.

You don’t want to have something amputated or removed unless you have to.