OK, while we have all heard about Identity Theft, I am willing to bet most, if not all, of you reading this believe that Identity Theft is only financially related and never imagined your medical identity could be stolen.  In fact, you may not even know what your medical identity refers to.

What is Medical Identity Theft?  Simply put, it is similar to all other types of Identity Theft in that someone pretends to be you, maybe through the use of fake ids or other falsified documents, and seeks medical care in your name so your insurance will flip the bill.  It sounds relatively painless (pun intended), doesn't it?

Well, you can easily see how this can affect you financially if you have limitations to how much you can spend annually through your insurance.  You will likely never see these bills and may find yourself getting "stuck" with them due to FTC rules covering financially related accounts.  So then, how can it kill you?

What happens when you seek medical help?  You go to a doctor or visit the ER and submit to treatment.  Let's say you have an allergy to penicillin that is found out, or maybe you developed diabetes, or even worse, found out you were HIV positive.  That information gets taken down by the doctor, and ultimately submitted to the MIB.  No, not Men in Black, but Medical Information Bureau.  This is your "permanent record" of your health.

Now, imagine the situation above was not you, but someone pretending to be you.  Does that scare you a little?  Let's say that it wasn't and now you go to the ER and the best thing to cure you is penicillin, do you think you are going to get it?  What if you had a severe allergy to penicillin for real, but someone else needed it during their treatment and that got recorded in your MIB file.  Now you have a problem that can be cured by it and your file has conflicting information.  Do you think you get it?  Maybe, and it may cause a severe reaction that confuses the doctors and they don't know how to help you.  Scaring you a little more?

Let's go a little further, remember that person who wasn't you, that used your name to find out they were HIV positive?  You can get AIDS that way, on paper anyways.  Now you go apply for life or health insurance.  Do you think that will have an affect on whether or not you get that insurance?  Maybe they will even turn you in for fraud since you tried to hide it. 

Did you know your medical records may also prevent you from obtaining a job?  And there is little or nothing you can do to change the information in that file, even if you can prove it wasn't you.  Why?  There is a law that restricts your ability to.

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) has restrictions to access anyone's personal file in an attempt to protect your information.  The problem is that it may prevent you from seeing and correcting your own file in an Identity Theft case.  Why?  You can only correct your own record, so if it might not be yours in the first place, you can see why they would not give you the information in the first place.

Beyond that, your records aren't just limited to your MIB file, they also go to other data collection agencies, such as insurers, collection agencies and credit bureaus.  All of these could end up with erroneous information, making it even more complicated to get things back to what they should be since the records are not centralized like in the banking industry.

OK, let's go into some real cases that will really help you understand the severity of this problem...(source - World Privacy Forum - Medical Identity Theft report)

1. Recently, a Colorado man whose Social Security Number, name, and address was stolen, found out he was a victim of medical identity theft when a bill collector wrote to demand the $44,000 he owed to a hospital ... for a surgery he never had. The victim did not have insurance, and had to go through a lengthy procedure to clear his name, a process that is ongoing aftermore than two years.
   
2. A Boston area psychiatrist made false entries in charts of individuals who were not his patients. He gave individuals diagnoses of drug addiction and abuse, severe depression and numerous psychiatric sessions which they did not actually have, then used their personal information to submit false bills to insurance. The victims, after learning of the crime, had difficulties getting the false information removed from their medical files. One woman told an investigator that she "is concerned about obtaining future health insurance coverage ... because her husband is self-employed."
   

3. Another non-patient of the same Boston psychiatrist discovered that his medical record had been falsified to include numerous psychiatric sessions that did not occur and false diagnoses of severe depression.  He discovered the false diagnoses after he had applied for employment.

4. One medical identity theft victim from Florida went for medical treatment and says she found that her medical files had been altered. She said that she discovered that an imposter had caused false entries on her file, including changes to her blood type.

5. An Ohio woman, while working at a dental office, accessed protected patient information and used the information to phone in prescriptions to area pharmacies. According to the Office of Inspector General, Health and Human Service, she "called in prescriptions in her name as well as the names of Medicaid recipients."

There are, unfortunately, many more cases that are similar to these and the problem is getting out of control.  So be vigiliant and protect your identity every way possible.  Don't limit your protection to credit monitoring or even ID Theft insurance as these will not truly protect you, nor be the best for you.