The US is such a large country and people can movie around so freely so how difficult do you think it would be to completely disappear?
Here's a few things I figured a person would need to do:
Get a passable fake ID.
Move to a place where one has zero connections.
Never contact family or friends.
Get odd jobs where payment is always in cash.
If a person was to do this, could they truly disappear?
I was thinking how hard it would be to be off the grid at Chase’s age. Hiding the identity is one thing but as you get older, you need more help with medical care and how do you keep under the radar when you have chronic age related conditions. You pay the hospital and doctors in cash? That will raise some suspicions for sure.
shareNot from the US, but my guess is that a lot of farmers, day laborers and such pay cash wherever they can, so that wouldn't be that uncommon.
shareI was thinking the same thing when he was showing Zoe his different medications at dinner. Of course, I'm sure those could be bought in cash via the black market.
For doctors' visits, that's trickier but many doctors do accept cash. And Chase didn't even bother going to a hospital after that car crash.
But man, that scene in the first episode showing he had that battery of testing including neuro / memory tests and, recall his wife suffered for years with Huntington’s disease. I just don’t know how those two have that body of prolonged medical care without the treaters trying to submit to Medicare or being suspicious when their patients want to pay what would be tens of thousands in medical bills with cash. Maybe that’s why the writers had that point about his regular long time physician being absent from the appointment. Point being that was meant to suggest a doctor-ally about Chase’s false identity perhaps?
shareYeah, good call. Maybe Chase had worked out a deal with the older doctor. Kind of like the relationship Jimmy/Saul has with the veterinarian on Better Call Saul.
shareNo paying doctors in cash and even clinics isn't that big of a deal. I have relatives that do that because they are old and don't trust banks. If they pay too much at one time for a major medical bill they would need to fill out forms for the IRS but most hospitals will work out a payment plan when you are self paying which would conveniently eliminate the large 10,000 or more payment problem.
shareBridges character did have large bricks of cash at the house in some later scenes so maybe what you’re talking about it how the writers intended us to assume
share> Get a passable fake ID.
To really disappear you would need to secure a fake identity.
Maybe steal someone else's or use a dead persons, or some other scam,
but if you do not have a real identity, even if you have an ID you would
eventually get tripped up by something - traffic stops, tax returns, work, health care.
The ID is the only difficult part. But if the best way to get one if you have no qualms about killing someone is locate someone that looks close to what you look like kill them, dispose of the body and take their ID and name. The only problem you have is you would need to go through their house and hope you could find a passport or birth certificate to go with their drivers license because in the future you would need more than a drivers license in some instances. You could easily pull their SS number from an old tax form which most people have on their computers. You might need to torture the person to get the information you needed before killing them, but again if you are the no qualms about killing type person why would care about torturing them. Now if the person has a family, you may also need to take them out and kill them as well. But they will still have extended family and friends that will eventually wonder where everyone vanished to. But that is to be expected if you pull this off in the US. It would be easier to do if you went out of the country and found and ex-pat that looked close to what you looked like.
I know people used to think you could just take over the identity of dead person, but that is much more difficult to do now because of computerized records. And you will need a SS number that isn't listed as belonging to a dead person. That's why you really will need to find and kill a live person that you take over the identity of... also you will need to move from the state where you killed the person to a new one so you can swap out drivers licenses. That way you'll get a drivers license with your actual photo and link to your finger print. Fortunately at this point the finger prints associated with licenses aren't used to verify who you are when you get the license they only use them if something comes up after the fact. So this would get you the useable ID that would connect to you.