Medical Identity Theft
Identity theft is something we’re all familiar with by now – some of us have become painfully familiar with the ensuing aggravation, paranoia and financial damage. But there’s a new and growing subset of identity theft whose ramifications can deadly.
Medical identity theft is a crime wherein your medical or insurance information is used to obtain medical care or to falsely file for payment of medical care. Perhaps it’s best illustrated by example:
- A Utah woman is threatened with losing custody of her children because the baby she delivered earlier in the week tested positive for methamphetamines. DNA testing finally proved she’s not the baby’s mother.
- An Alabama man argues repeatedly with a bill collector trying to obtain $10,000 for treatment of the man’s hand. Ultimately, x-rays prove that, though his name is the same, his was not the hand they treated.
- An AIDS patient in Connecticut uses his cousin’s medical identity and receives $80,000 for treatment over a 15-year period.
- A Florida woman is billed for the surgical amputation of her right foot. She was able to convince the hospital to stop billing her when she showed them she was still in possession of both feet. But a year later when she was hospitalized for a hysterectomy, a nurse looked at her chart and said, “I see you have diabetes.” The woman is not diabetic, but somewhere there is a one-footed diabetic woman using her medical identity.
Because the crime can go undetected forever, it’s hard to get a number of affected victims but the Federal Trade Commission estimates that 200,000 medical identities are stolen every year. All it takes is a lost or stolen wallet that contains an insurance card and a driver’s license, and you could be a victim of medical identity theft.
But in most cases the theft is conducted by an employee in a doctor’s office or hospital who may have access to the records of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of patients. With a street value of $50 to $60 each, the records could be worth millions of dollars.
Not surprisingly, this is the most common way for medical identities to be stolen, according to Pam Dixon, Executive Director of World Privacy Forum. In some cases phony clinics are set up, or real ones purchased, for the sole purpose of harvesting medical identities.
Tags: , ID theft, Identity Theft, Medical Identity Theft
