Medical Identity Theft - When the Damage Involves More Than Money…

Medical identity theft costs the American insurance industry as much as $180 billion annually. The reason for this is that transactions are increasingly depending on the Internet to expedite processes, such as filing claims. But money may be the least of your problems when you're a victim of medical identity theft.

A type of identity fraud, medical identity theft involves the perpetrator using another person's identity and/or insurance information to benefit from medicine or services, or to file false claims.

Medical identity theft is among the methods of fraud that are least known about. But compared to the more popular cases of Financial (or even Internet) fraud, medical identity theft can damage your record for a longer period AND even cause you to undergo the wrong kind of medical treatment!

What can medical identity theft involve?

• Misdiagnoses on your medical records
• Erroneous blood type, illnesses, etc.
• Additional (false) entries, such as psychiatric sessions, prescribed meds, etc.
• Multiple medical histories at various hospitals

Medical Identity Theft - Why Damage Control Is Difficult

The fallout from medical identity theft can be harder to control and correct because, unlike, say, your credit records that are centralized at several agencies, your medical records are decentralized. If a thief used your identification info at several hospitals across various states, you can spend a lifetime trying to correct the problem!

Take the case of a man in Pennsylvania who suffered from the damage wrought by medical identity theft. A thief was found to have used the man's identity to get over $100,000 in treatments.

The problem was that the scam involved five separate hospitals and, in each place, the thief created a new medical history under his victim's name! Imagine how hard it was to clean that up!

Often, all the erroneous charges, diagnoses, treatments, etc. are transmitted and retransmitted through several medical and insurance industry networks before you ever get a hint of anything wrong going on.

The end result: a trail of wrong information that can follow you around for many years and cause you both medical and financial damage.

What are the consequences of medical identity theft?

• You could get wrong treatments.
• You may find your health insurance used up all of a sudden.
• You could be regarded as uninsurable (for both health AND life policies).
• You may fail pre-employment health checkups.
• You could have reputation-damaging diagnoses on your medical record.

As yet, US laws are inadequate, making medical identity theft difficult to detect.