The great state of Nevada has taken a bold step toward innovation—or, depending on your perspective, lunacy—with Assembly Bill 20. The piece of legislative craftsmanship proposes that the Department of Motor Vehicles be allowed the privilege of slapping personalized medical condition symbols on driver’s licenses and ID cards, presumably to ensure that no citizen goes unclassified.
Yes, friends, in a world where we can’t use our driver’s license to prove we are who we say we are at the ballot box, we can be conveniently sorted by our ailments. No longer must the DMV be limited to the crude efficiency of a single symbol denoting a medical condition; now, with individualized codes, your card can function as both identification and a handy pocket-sized medical dossier.
Why stop there? Perhaps they’ll include your dietary restrictions and emotional triggers to round things out.
The DMV can only affix a single, mysterious symbol to indicate a medical condition, a practice that, while already questionable, at least afforded a shred of ambiguity. Under the proposed bill, each affliction— an allergy to peanuts, a tendency toward melancholy, or an unfortunate case of gout—may receive a distinguishing mark.
Imagine the possibilities–a little storm cloud for depression, a sneezing emoji for allergies, or maybe a tiny skull and crossbones for those with serious ailments.
The measure doesn’t stop there. In a move toward modernization, the bill also aims to streamline how the DMV pesters vehicle owners about their liability insurance.
Instead of sending an official-looking letter that gets promptly ignored, the department will now have the option of bombarding citizens with emails. The same folks who ignore paper notices will leap into action at the sight of an urgent DMV email—nestled somewhere between a phishing scam and an offer for discounted auto warranties.
Not everyone is thrilled with this grand vision of bureaucratic efficiency. The Libertarian Party of Nevada has taken a firm stance against the proposal, pointing out that a driver’s license—already a highly requested form of identification—could become an involuntary medical file accessible in places where no reasonable person would expect to see their medical history.
After all, do we want the bouncer at the local saloon scrutinizing our license for a diagnosis before letting us in?
The bill, first introduced on February 4, continues to wind its way through the legislative process, with another hearing scheduled for February 20. One can only hope that, amid all this effort to catalog our conditions, someone remembers that the DMV’s primary function is to regulate drivers, not moonlight as a branch of the medical profession.
The Old Blog in the Desert 
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