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Financial identity theft might wound your wallet,
but medical identity theft can kill you.
Medical identity theft
occurs when criminals obtain information such as a health insurance identification
or Social Security number and use it to get health care or to obtain reimbursement
from insurers and others for false claims. That means your medical history and
health care records can include someone else's information. This can be life threatening:
for example, causing a transfusion of the wrong blood type. "People
can die from this crime," says Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy
Forum, a privacy rights group. "It is a potentially huge issue. It's an incredibly
intransigent problem and victims are finding that they have to sue health care
providers to have their records corrected."
As paper-based, medical-record-keeping systems evolve
toward electronically based interconnected systems, the potential
for catastrophic errors is on the rise.
Hospitals
and insurance companies face enormous expenses when it comes to medical identity
theft, as they are forced to write-off charges incurred by the thieves. But its
victims find that the financial aspects of this type of identity theft are the
easiest to deal with -- it's the potential medical consequences that are much
tougher to correct. Because health privacy and access laws
lag behind credit access and reporting laws, victims frequently have little recourse
to correct errors in their reports, and even when corrected, errors are apt to
pop up again years later. Often victims are unaware for years that their medical
identities have been stolen, according to the World Privacy Forum. Health
care providers, concerned about possible liabilities, are reluctant to correct
errors in medical records and in some cases inform victims that the identity of
the thief is protected under federal privacy laws so the victim can't even view
the part of their records that is wrong. What
it is
There are two aspects to medical identity theft: medical and
financial. The medical consequences involve the medical information and records
of the thief becoming intermingled with your own records. So, your medical record
could reflect a major surgery that you never had, and these records would include
details relating to the health history of the thief rather than your own. Relying
on those false records, future health care providers might easily make inaccurate
diagnoses, resulting in medical errors or delaying proper treatment. The
financial aspects are the same that any consumers victimized by identity theft
face: unpaid bills, serious blemishes on credit reports and harassing phone calls
from collections agencies. The health care system is much
more able to deal with the financial aspects than it is with the medical consequences
for patients. Dealing with the medical consequences is much
more difficult, not only because of the loopholes in federal medical privacy laws
-- the chief one being the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act,
or HIPAA, of 1996 -- but also because the federal government isn't enforcing HIPAA,
including those provisions that might help the victims of medical identity theft.
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