Identity, Insurance and Identity Theft
June 28, 2008
The latest fraud scam to hit the US is of medical-identity theft. If you are thinking as to how that is possible, the answer is so simple that it is literally staring you in the face but yet you are unaware of it. Recent studies show that a simple thing like a stolen or lost health insurance card and divulging of seemingly harmless personal information can lead to medical-identity theft.
Often involved in this scam are the workers in the health-care industry who have access to personal files of patients and are readily selling them off to identity-theft rings. The mechanism behind is simple; the thief assumes your identity and gets his medical bills accounted in your name. Ordinary citizens are unaware of this scheming till they realize that they have hit their insurance cap and that too for illnesses they never had. A more fatal revelation can come when the doctor administers treatment to you based on your imposter’s personal records, including his allergies and blood-type.
This is becoming a major source of concern for health policy makers in the US because even though with legal assistance you can recover the financial damage done, the changes made to the health file are hard to recover as most people do not know what goes in their in the first place. At present though the number of identity-theft cases recorded is relatively small-8 million in 2005 with 3 percent of the total being medical identity-thefts. But national lawmakers are beginning to take notice.
In California the security breach law now requires the medical health care and insurance companies to inform the people concerned if their personal medical information has somehow been compromised. Hopefully, the situation should improve with more significant laws in this context.
