Medicare Opts for Convenience not Consumer Safety      

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With identity theft running rampant throughout the world, guarding Social Security numbers and other personal and pertinent information has become essential. 

Private insurers issue identification cards, and they used to place the individual’s Social Security number on the cards as part of the identification or as the identification number itself.  In recent years, this practice has been discontinued because too many people have had their numbers and identification stolen.

In fact, Medical Identification Stealing and Fraud has become the fastest growing form of identification theft in recent years.  This being the case, Medicare has been asked by the Social Security Administration, Congress and the public to remove these numbers from their identification cards, however, so far, they have resisted doing this.

Why the resistance, especially since others have already willingly complied?  One reason is that it is inconvenient.  The other is that at this point, the Social Security Administration is not allowed to force Medicare or the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to remove this information.

CMS has said that the risk of identity theft by using the individual’s Social Security number on Medicare identification cards and other information is not that great.  Yet, statistics show that this is not the case.  There is a great risk, and predators are taking advantage of this information constantly.  In addition, CMS also says that if they started to issue new Medicare cards all of a sudden, it could worry, startle or upset Medicare beneficiaries.

It seems that if there was a nice letter sent to each beneficiary announcing a newly designed card would be coming in the mail within 10 days or two weeks, it might be accepted as good news, especially if the letter explained that the individual’s Social Security number would no longer be on the Medicare card, thus protecting the individual.  It would seem that this would be well received as a positive message and a positive action by a government agency – CMS – whose job it is to look out for the interests of its clients – Medicare beneficiaries.

There seem to be a lot of good options available for government decisions about situations such as this.  It doesn’t have to be complicated.  It is simply a matter of opting to consider the privacy and safety of Medicare beneficiaries, rather than the convenience for the CMS agency.

Entry Filed under: General-Medicare