What is medical identity theft?

Medical identity theft occurs when someone uses a person’s name and sometimes other parts of their identity — such as insurance information — without the person’s knowledge or consent to obtain medical services or goods, or uses the person’s identity information to make false claims for medical services or goods. Medical identity theft frequently results in erroneous entries being added to existing medical records, and can involve the creation of fictitious medical records in the victim’s name, ultimately leading to issues such as canceled insurances, being put into a coma due to improper treatment because of erroneous medical data, or even death.

Medical identity theft is a crime that can cause great harm to its victims. Yet, despite the profound risk it carries, it is the least [for now] studied and most poorly documented of the cluster of identity theft crimes. It is also the most difficult to fix after the fact, because victims have limited rights and recourses, not affording the attorney costs to help [until now]. Medical identity theft typically leaves a trail of falsified information in medical records that can plague victims’ medical and financial lives for years.

This entry was posted on January 19, 2009 at 8:44 pm and is filed under IDT - Medical. 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.

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