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Monday, January 3, 2011

SICKOS - MEDICAL ID THEFT - IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU!

Newsmax Magzine has a great article about Medical ID Theft and how rampant it is today. It talks about how easy it is for thieves to access your medical records, get expensive medical care in your name, and have the bills sent to YOU. Can you imagine what it is going to be like when all medical records are stored in a Washington, D.C. computer as required by Obamacare? Obamamama wants all medical records nationwide to be available electronically by 2015.

But guess what? It is expected that medical identity theft crimes will SOAR IN NUMBERS once stored in Washington because it will be easier to steal thousands of patient records at a time from a very vulnerable database. And if you think your medical records will not be vulnerable and will be safe electronically stored, think of Wikileaks. Unless you live in a cave you surely have heard about the millions of classified documents stolen by a lowly Army private. He simply walked out of his Army office with the documents stored on a disc.

How many patients' medical records do you think can be stored on one disc? And how many government employees do you think will have access to YOUR medical records? And how much money do you think identity thieves would pay to get their hands on your private medical records? And if you think there will be safeguards, the Pentagon thought so too.

Electronic health records could potentially result in the theft of millions of records by cyber criminals who RECENTLY had no trouble hacking into the Department of Homeland Security, the White House, and medical facilities across the nation. The government can't even keep Homeland Security and White House computers safe.

As the head of Patient Privacy Rights Foundation stated, this is "going to be disaster" and "Identity theft numbers will explode and patient privacy and health record accuracy will be seriously eroded." As many as 1.2 million Americans have already been victimized by medical identity theft.

Besides the nightmare of trying to "fix" your financial health, an additional consequence will be widespread corruption of your records. For instance, your data in a thief's file or a thief's data in your file, wrong blood types, incorrect medication lists, wrong elective surgeries, sexually transmitted disease errors, incorrect psychotic disorders, and so on. And the fun part? It will be up to YOU to cleanse your records in your doctor's office and at your insurance company servers and back-up systems. And you won't be able to do it because doctor's offices and insurance companies are not required to cooperate with you in your efforts to clean up the mess. In fact, you may not have access to the thief's records even though the thief is using your name and information. The thief also has privacy protection "rights."

Think it can't happen to you? Well, think again. UCLA Medical Center had a huge breach of patients' records. Doctors and nurses were fired for snooping. Doctors and nurses sworn to protect their patients and they still snooped. What do you think some lowly employee on the government payroll is going to do?

Here are some ways to protect your medical records:

Use a cross-cut shredder to destroy all correspondence associated with health insurance or medical providers.
Do not provide your health insurance information to anyone who phones you or solicits you on the Internet.
Ask your physician and providers to check put a note in your chart that they must check your identification before admitting you for care.
Check all statements for services from your health care providers. If you find unfamiliar treatments request copies of the medical treatment and billing records. Once you get the file, if it is a "commingled" file, remove sensitive information pertaining to your health and financials and make a police report immediately. A police investigation will be instigated.

And last but really most important, scream at your Senator and Congressman about Obamacare. Cite this information. Tell them you don't want your medical records stored in Washington and available to millions of federal government employees for the taking.

2 comments:

  1. personally i never had problems with my medical records before, but i have to say i'm a little concern about the future of putting all medical records available online. something about it just don't seems right.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't think that the health records are exposed to everyone.. do they?

    ReplyDelete