Re: Patient Money - Your Medical Problems Could Include Identity Theft - NYTimes.com

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Stewart Baker <stewart.baker () gmail com>
Date: June 14, 2009 2:49:30 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] Patient Money - Your Medical Problems Could Include  
Identity  Theft - NYTimes.com

A portion of my posts about medical ID theft, which suggest that the
privacy groups helped cause the problem.  So here's an SAT-type
question:  doctors are to iatrogenic disease as privacy campaigners
are to ---- ?

Stewart Baker


Identity theft can kill you?

Yep. How so? Well, first, medical ID theft is a growing problem.
Here's a fascinating report on this undercovered problem:
http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/pdf/wpf_medicalidtheft2006.pdf

It turns out that doctors and nurses with a drug problem make fake
entries in patient files to justify prescriptions that they fill for
themselves. Medicare and Medicaid fraudsters concoct entire courses of
treatment for real people and bill for them. And illegal immigrants
who wouldn't be eligible for services on their own use the identities
they've already stolen to get jobs as a way of getting treatment.

That's bad, but what's especially troubling for ordinary citizens is
the way it screws up their medical records. They may only find out
about the fraud when they're told they've used up the lifetime health
insurance limits they paid for. Or, worse, they could go in for
treatment unconscious and be given a transfusion of the wrong blood
type because their records had been altered to match the blood type of
the identity thief. That's a pretty heavy price to pay for identity
theft. And it's likely to get worse as the Administration's electronic
medical record initiative takes hold, and medical records are
increasingly consolidated into a single electronic patient history
that is accessible by all providers.

HIPAA, perhaps unsurprisingly, is more or less useless in addressing
the problem. The privacy advocates who helped draft it were so busy
abusing pharmaceutical companies and insurers that they evidently
didn't have time to think about privacy violations that might kill us.

***

Wait! Does that mean the National Governors Association is going to  
kill us?

The medical identity theft report I cited earlier shows a startling
connection between medical identity theft, REAL ID, and the National
Governor's Association.

The report contains this charmingly clueless passage about what health
care providers are doing to stop medical ID theft.

   Some providers at Kaiser Permanente, a health network with 30
medical centers and 431 medical offices, now ask to see a driver’s
license in addition to the program’s health card. The University of
Connecticut Health Center, concerned after a case of medical identity
theft occurred there, began checking patient driver’s licenses.


That would be a great idea if driver's licenses were actually a secure
form of identification. But they aren't. They suffer from a variety of
bad security practices that make it easy to get a real license issued
in a false name. That's something that REAL ID was designed to fix. To
take one example, it would have required states to actually perform an
electronic validation of "breeder documents," like birth certificates,
before the documents could be used to obtain a license.

But the National Governors Association doesn't want states to have to
spend money improving driver's license security, and it bridles at the
federal government setting standards for license security. NGA is
leading the charge to repeal REAL ID and substitute a new driver's
license law that would among other things eliminate any need for
states to validate breeder documents. The NGA is likely to win that
battle.

If they succeed, of course, it will remain easy for people to get
driver's licenses in other people's names. And then to get medical
treatment in other people's names. And in the process to change the
blood types on record for the poor sucker whose identity they've
stolen with that driver's license.

(The privacy advocates who neglected identity theft when HIPAA was
passed are playing an even worse role here. The ACLU and others are
campaigning to repeal REAL ID, and they've laid down covering fire for
the NGA's attack. So in the name of protecting privacy, they're making
the world safer for what could be deadly forms of privacy invasion.)

So if you're wondering whether your governor is trying to kill you,
the fairest answer is "Not exactly." That's just a side effect of the
effort to unravel REAL ID.

More at homelandreadinglist ...

On 6/14/09, David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/health/13patient.html?hpw
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Stewart Baker
202-641-8670




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