Dale Penn

Part I:

What you can’t detect, anticipate, control or prevent could kill you.

There is a dark world far beyond the gates of mere identity theft. This region lies beyond the boundaries of credit card fraud, phishing and pharming scams or corporate data breaches.

The victims who inhabit this world are reportedly growing in number. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently reported that as many as 250,000 Americans may be engulfed in medical identity theft each year.

The current economic climate fans the flames of temptation for perpetrators who include health care workers, those with access to medical and insurance records and regular Janes and Joes who are personally struggling with the economic reality of “too much month left over at the end of the money.”

Its not just the career criminals who are taking advantage of the health data that falls into their hands, but desperate and otherwise harmless opportunists who can’t resist the temptation to latch on to someone else’s medical history.

Consumers drowning in debt, may find the lure of this type of theft too great to resist according to Chris Dorn, a fraud expert with Ingenix, a health care investigations firm in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Dorn says “Anytime you have 47 million Americans without adequate health care coverage, you will have people out there willing to steal it.”

The life threatening nature of this type of fraud and theft are apparent. Imagine that someone else’s medical problems were suddenly thrust into your medical records without your knowledge. This could change the way you are treated in a hospital or emergency room, change your blood type and allergy records or litter your personal medical files with maladies that could affect your ability to travel or to obtain certain types of insurance.

Next post, I’ll take a closer look at this growing problem and examine what the experts are commonly referring to as the age of “medical exploitation.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 6:54 am and is filed under Medical Identity Theft, Personal privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.