House GOP Takes the Lead on Protecting Medicare Beneficiaries and Taxpayers
Today, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the agency has, three months ahead of schedule, completed the removal of Social Security numbers from Medicare cards.
Upon CMS’s announcement, top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee Kevin Brady (R-TX) released the following statement:
As required by statute, in April 2018, CMS began to issue new Medicare cards no longer containing Social Security numbers. Today, the agency reported that this project has now been completed.
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According to the CMS:
- The Social Security Administration (SSA)
- The United States Railroad Retirement Board (RRB)
- Health care providers
- Health plans
“Every person with Medicare has been assigned an MBI and we’ve mailed a new Medicare card to nearly every beneficiary. The MBI is confidential like the SSN and should be protected as Personally Identifiable Information.
“The biggest reason we took the SSN off of Medicare cards is to fight medical identity theft for people with Medicare.
“By replacing the SSN-based HICN on all Medicare cards, we’re better protecting:
- Private health care and financial information.
- Federal health care benefit and service payments.
“We’ve often heard from Congress, the General Accountability Office, people with Medicare, and advocacy groups that they wanted the SSN taken off Medicare cards.
“We mailed the new Medicare cards with the MBI to all people with Medicare in phases by geographic location. The switch to MBIs hasn’t changed how we find non-active Medicare beneficiaries. The MBI and the HICN don’t tell us which beneficiaries are non-active, so we’ll keep using the data that does give us that information.”
