I am a senior citizen. While this distinction entitles me to a variety of perks like discounted movies and bus fare – as well as the occasional free doughnut (seriously) — it’s also a ticket to the identity theft lottery.
Turning 50 gets you an invitation to AARP, and turning 65 gets you a Medicare card. What’s this have to do with identity theft? Take a close look at a Medicare card. The identification number? It’s a combination of the cardholder’s Social Security number and one or two letters.
Health insurers no longer include Social Security numbers on the cards they issue to people. The concern was that using SSNs needlessly increased the risk of identity theft, which was, and continues to be, rising exponentially. When health insurers made the change, they stopped being co-conspirators in what has become a national epidemic.
According an article by reporter Robert Pear in the New York Times, private insurers under contract with Medicare are not permitted to use SSNs on insurance cards when providing medical or prescription drug benefits. But in a serious case of “Do as I say, not as I do,” Medicare has used Social Security numbers on more than 50 million benefit cards, heedless of the warnings of privacy advocates, consumer protection officials, federal auditors and investigators working on identity theft cases.
Section 501 of the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015, a bipartisan provision written by Rep. Sam Johnson (R-TX) and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), signed into law recently by President Obama, finally mandates the removal of Social Security numbers from our Medicare cards. (Well, let’s just say it begins the process — and, like all processes in Washington, let’s hope it actually gets done before my toddler is eligible for Medicare.) The new law is clear: Social Security numbers must not be “displayed, coded or embedded on the Medicare card.”
More than 4,500 of my fellow seniors enroll in Medicare every day. It is estimated that over the next 10 years, some 18 million more of us are projected to qualify, which will bring the total Medicare enrollment to 74 million by 2025.
What Lit the Fire?
After years of begging, cajoling and warning to no avail, what finally forced both parties in Washington to get off their butts and get it right?
Pear speculates that is wasn’t one thing but a set of circumstances starting with the nearly universal digitization of medical records and, of course, ending with a culture plagued by highly effective hackers. Consider that in just the first quarter of 2015 more than 91 million Social Security numbers were exposed to unauthorized persons in just two data compromises: Anthem and Premera.
What the new system will look like is still anyone’s guess. Here’s what we know, according to the New York Times article: SSNs will be replaced by a “randomly generated Medicare beneficiary identifier.” Additionally, Medicare officials have eight years to get the new system completely up and running—four years to issue cards to new beneficiaries and four more years to reissue cards to existing beneficiaries. It was unclear whether those two four-year items were to happen simultaneously, but since we’re talking about a government timeline there is an argument for erring on the side of forever.
Like all major government initiatives, this will be no small feat. But it is a critical one if we are to stop hearing the pitter-patter of scammer feet tap dancing on the finances of senior citizens.
Why did it take so long? Why does the IRS still require SSNs? Because we’re talking about the government.
The record speaks for itself:
- 2004 – The Government Accountability Office warns we must reduce our dependence on Social Security numbers as individual identifiers.
- 2007 – The White House Office of Management and Budget directs federal agencies to “eliminate the unnecessary collection and use of Social Security numbers” within two years.
- 2008 – The inspector general of Social Security calls for the immediate removal of Social Security numbers from Medicare cards. The departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs launch major initiatives to delete Social Security numbers from their identification cards.
