While we can hope our health care industry will promote consumer involvement in decisions through education and transparency, it may take a more disruptive intervention to shift perceptions.
Medical identity theft is a costly and potentially dangerous crime that is incredibly difficult to resolve. To make matters worse, medical identity theft often goes undiscovered for long periods of time and only becomes more detrimental and difficult to resolve the longer it goes undetected.
Health plans, their insurers, employer and other sponsors, and business associates should review critically and carefully the adequacy of their current HIPAA Privacy and Security compliance policies, monitoring, training, breach notification and other practices.
A rapidly building wave of innovative new care and payment models will lead to breakthroughs in healthcare. The winners in the next epoch of healthcare will be those that have agility in contrast to the lumbering nature of traditional healthcare systems.
Who would work harder, take that extra job, or seek a promotion when most of the added earnings would be taxed away or government benefits are reduced?
One scenario is that when CMS/Medicare learns (and they will) it has been paying for work comp-related medical care, it will seek repayment from the claimant. The claimant, having spent the work comp settlement, will be unable to pay. Ultimately, it will be the employer and/or insurance carrier that will be held accountable.