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Comment by consp | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think a whitelist of phone numbers is a workable solution for most people.

My local hospital telephones with private numbers, which is the only reason I cannot completely block them and thus cannot use a whitelist. Outside of working hours I do not answer them. I told them it is a problem and they placed a note in my record to call me from a public phone which is nice of them (not their own desk but from a service desk which has a number displayed) but I imagine they sadly sometimes forget.

The UK number is a hassle too, all kinds of +44 numbers spoofing or reusing existing non-fixed location numbers to seem legitimate since some phones provide direct listing of the name of the company. They are actually foreign redirects which cost insane amounts of money if you call them back.

I would also like a native way of blacklisting number blocks (like +44), my phone currently can't unfortunately.

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>My local hospital telephones with private numbers, which is the only reason I cannot completely block them and thus cannot use a whitelist.

Can anyone with more context explain to me why a rational person decided on this? It's Biblically frustrating for me because 9/10 withheld numbers are spammers or scammers and I don't want to pick up the phone to them but 1/10 it's my local doctor's surgery who I can't ignore. It's such an antisocial thing for doctors of all people to do, but it seems to be common enough people across the world have to deal with it.

Probably patient privacy and the intersection with domestic abuse.

Mostly because there is usually a bunch of phones in a practice (and a shitload in hospitals), and you don't want patients to call back to for example the MRT/CT lab.

The other problem is privacy... imagine a woman consulting her ob/gyn about an abortion. The ob/gyn calls the woman back, and suddenly the abusive husband sees the phone number of the ob/gyn practice on the incoming call log.

While I do understand this reasoning somewhat I don't know why its only limited to hospitals and doctors. I can imagine thousands of situations where this abusive partner would have a problem with an incoming number hospital or not. I'm not sure its a great idea to structure our communications around hypothetical abusive people, a call directly to the number that is provided from the organization you provided it to is private enough.

> I'm not sure its a great idea to structure our communications around hypothetical abusive people

Domestic violence is far from hypothetical [1], it is the sad reality we live in. Medicine in particular has a responsibility by the Hippocratic Oath to avoid causing harm, and the laws (e.g. HIPAA) reflect that responsibility.

[1] https://www.socialsolutions.com/blog/domestic-violence-stati...

So, women are abused sometimes therefore doctor's must mask their numbers due to the Hippocratic Oath and HIPAA? Do the doctor's have to disguise their voices as well? Maybe they should talk in code. I won't pretend to be an expert on HIPAA but I very strongly doubt that calling from random numbers is part of it. Wouldn't the random calls look suspicious to the abuser in this circumstance? IMHO something like this would cause more abuse than just I dunno.. lying about why the doctor's office called.

> Wouldn't the random calls look suspicious to the abuser in this circumstance?

No, precisely because random calls from suppressed numbers are so common for spam.

Physicians want to be accessible only via specific channels, to protect their time and to ensure there is consistent process across patients. Most of the time as a patient you can’t call them directly, unless you work through the page operator or you plan ahead with them on predefined phone number and time.

> to protect their time

Then they should understand why people ignore calls coming from unverified numbers.

Unless they're using their personal cell phone, this should be a basic feature of the hospitals phone system, it is a feature decades old. No reason the caller ID should be set to the DID of the doctor.

Not from the UK, I don't actually get why calling a local/in-country number could incur high cost. How could one identify a paid/free/local number without trial-and-error?

In my country, you only incur normal minutes when you call an ordinary non-overseas number. By ordinary, these numbers have a normal number of digits, and a known prefix. Paid call always have shorter or longer phone number.

I'm from the UK and I can confirm that I am billed for the number I dialed not any forwarding endpoint. If I am inside the UK and I dial a landline (starting 01, 02 or 03) it will usually be included in my monthly contract allowance.

It's regulated by the UK regulator OFCOM. They publish a list of number prefixes and the maximum costs that can be incurred:

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-internet/advice...

Some of those costs are high, but they are published, and capped. There are no surprises here.

There are a couple of myths that circulate endlessly in this country that:

i) You can receive a call from a scammer who prompts you to 'press 1' to be connected to an agent, and if you press 1 you're dialing a premium number and can incur large costs. This is impossible, inbound calls in the UK are not billable, nor can inbound calls count against any inclusive minutes on a contract.

ii) You can dial a cheap-looking number but the call is forwarded to an international or premium-rate destination and you can incur large costs. This is impossible, you can only be billed for the number you dialed, any onward forwarding costs would be incurred by the owner of the number you initally dialed.

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