” To turn your life upside down, it takes only one person at one of those places willing to use her access as an opportunity for exploitation."...and treatment plans could kill you if the information is falsified and demented to where it nowhere relates to any conditions and aliments you may be treated for...last week I posted this story on how easy this can be done without your knowledge...I guess we might have to start wrapping our wallets in foil....BD
Katrina Brooke felt well prepared for the birth of her son, Andrew, three Aprils ago. The only complication was her Caesarean section; otherwise, everything went smoothly. After three days in the hospital, Brooke returned to her home outside of Seattle to recover and enjoy her baby boy.
Three weeks later, as Brooke stood in her kitchen opening mail, she found a curious $94 bill from a local health clinic, a place neither she nor her husband had ever heard of. Stranger still, the notice was addressed to her newborn son: Andrew had apparently visited the clinic and been prescribed the painkiller OxyContin for a work-related back injury. Imagine what could happen if someone else’s medical history was injected into your records: You could arrive at an ER and be given the wrong type of blood or be refused medication because your file says you are allergic. And because mistakes in medical records can be notoriously hard to expunge, you could spend years convincing doctors you weren’t actually diagnosed with the diseases, mental illness or substance-abuse problems appearing in your file. As Lomax learned, your insurance card isn’t just something you dust off for doctor’s appointments — in the hands of a thief, it becomes a credit card, a PIN and a license to spend.
The thief’s records had circulated electronically and intermingled with her own. Moran’s emergency contact number was listed in Sachs’s file, and there may have been other mistakes, such as the thief’s blood type. Sachs — who has a blood-clotting disorder and for whom the wrong medication could be disastrous — was savvy enough to alert the hospital staff, who straightened out her charts before making a critical error. “Had [Moran’s] baby not tested positive for drugs, I wouldn’t have known anything about it,” Sachs says. “I have a hard time believing that everything is back the way it was before. It’s terrifying to think about.”
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