Why is that a face-palm?
They only ask for 3 years on the initial app - and have found this to be sufficient for vetting perfect strangers. Why ask for more on a 5-year medical renewal?
Well, they're checking it against "the tapes" as Doc calls them...
Points:
They have the data from the insurance coding clearinghouses anyway, so why ask at all? Ahh... Because they want to know if you did something outside of that system...
So if they're going to ask, why skip two of the years covered by the medical?
Think about it... You get a five year, then go outside the U.S. insurance system for medical care (even if unintentional - say you're living overseas), and then don't report those visits in that first two years.
Yes. Perjury. Stupid. Good way to get in trouble. But they don't have the data to prove it.
Seems to this engineering brain, they built a hole into their system simply by not changing the stupid form to say 5 years. The folks on shorter schedules would simply write "PRNC" for the stuff they'd already reported, and the hole would be closed.
It's my systems engineering brain pointing this out to me... Which I will point out, before someone tells me that Budda says I shouldn't speak of Bad Things(TM) or it makes me an evil perjurer... Like the poor dude in the Hobbs thread... that...
I didn't make the system, I'm just analyzing it for stupidity.
Government loves poorly thought out forms. I always love the emergency contact forms that ask for blood type. No Doc on the planet is going to stuff blood in your body without typing you in today's world. But it's still on every form created back in the 1940s.
Either the FAA Docs trust their system of cross-checks against insurance data or they don't. Remove the reporting or make it match the length of time since the last application are the only two sane options, anything else is dumb.
