As if having your financial life stolen right from under you wasn’t enough, now we need to introduce the concept of medical identity theft to our blog readers. An example of the way medical identity theft affects individuals is a New York Times feature story of Brandon Sharp. Brandon is a oil and gas company manager in his late 30s and is fairly healthy. He has never had to visit an emergency room and yet lately was made aware that he owes thousands of dollars in emergency-service bills! After getting a current copy of his credit report, Brandon found that he had collection notices from all over the US.
“There was even a $19,000 bill for a Life Flight air ambulance service in some remote location I’d never heard of,” said Mr. Sharp, who made this unhappy discovery in 2003. “I had emergency room bills from places like Bowling Green, Kan., where I’ve never even visited. I’m still cleaning up the mess.”

Back in 2007 it was reported that there were 250,000 known cases of medical identity theft. That is just the number of those that were known and reported. The number that are not yet discovered is more than likely astronomical being that most people don’t check their credit until they need to use it and are denied for blemishes that may or may not have been theirs.

Criminals use names, social security numbers and/or stolen insurance information to receive medical care at the expense of the rightful owner. Insurance companies are even paying false medical claims, at the victims’ expense and without the victim knowing. Severe cases even involve having the wrong medical information on file which could cause doctors to misdiagnose the victim in a real emergency.

Beware of this crime and get your free credit report now to check for any fraudulent activity (medical or otherwise).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Medical Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.