Medicare card remake to protect the ‘seniors’

Opposing ideas

WASHINGTON, Sept 14, (Agencies): Medicare cards are getting a makeover to fight identity theft.

No more Social Security numbers plastered on the card. Next April, Medicare will begin mailing every beneficiary a new card with a unique new number to identify them.

“Criminals are increasingly targeting people age 65 and older for medical identity theft,” Medicare chief Seema Verma told The Associated Press. “We are committed to preventing fraud.”

Medicare is revealing the cards’ new design on Thursday as the government gears up for a massive transition that will involve coordination with 58 million beneficiaries and their family members, plus hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, pharmacies and state governments.

While the first mailings of new cards begin next April, Congress has set an April 2019 deadline for all beneficiaries to have received one.

One goal is to make sure seniors know what’s coming so they’re not confused by the change — and in the meantime, are reminded to guard their old cards that, if lost or stolen, can leave them vulnerable to financial and legal consequences. The government recorded 2.6 million cases of identity fraud involving seniors in 2014, up from 2.1 million in 2012.

Verma said one woman reported her Medicare card was stolen, got a replacement and thought no more about it until two years later when she learned she might be arrested: The thief had impersonated her to get opioid painkillers.

Sanders

Destroy

Medicare has set up a website — www.cms.gov/ newcard — and is beginning ads to tell beneficiaries what to expect starting next spring. Medicare will automatically mail beneficiaries their new card. They’ll be instructed to destroy their old cards after they get a new one. New cards may be used right away.

Private insurers already have stopped using Social Security numbers on ID cards.

While the Medicare change is crucial for seniors, the transition period also is a time when crooks may pounce, warned AARP’s Amy Nofziger, a fraud prevention expert.

“If anyone calls you to say you need to pay for your new Medicare card, it is a scam,” she said. “If anybody is calling you and asking you to verify your Social Security number in order to issue your new Medicare card, it is a scam.”

Meanwhile, US senators unveiled two opposing visions of a healthcare system in the United States on Wednesday — leading liberals advocating government insurance for all and several Republicans proposing an eleventh-hour repeal of Obamacare to replace it with programs run by the states.

Neither plan was thought likely to succeed in a Congress exhausted with fighting over the issue, raising questions over whether lawmakers would instead prop up the health benefits offered under former president Barack Obama’s healthcare law.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, a 2016 Democratic Party presidential candidate, held a campaignstyle gathering at which enthusiasts applauded as he proposed extending the federal Medicare health insurance program for seniors to include everyone.

“The American people want to know what we are going to do to fix a dysfunctional healthcare system which costs us twice as much per person as any other country and yet leaves 28 million people uninsured, and even more underinsured,” Sanders declared.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, one of 16 Democratic co-sponsors for Sanders’ proposal, told the gathering it was time to go a step beyond Obamacare, the 2010 law officially called the Affordable Care Act that expanded health coverage to 20 million Americans.

“We will say that in this country everyone gets a basic right to healthcare,” Warren said.

Chance

But in an office building nearby, Republican senators announced they were offering a “last chance” to repeal Obamacare, before a parliamentary procedure allowing them to pass it with a simple majority, instead of a three-fifths majority like most Senate legislation, expires at the end of September.

They proposed replacing the law with a program that would give states money in the form of block grants to run their own healthcare programs.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the plan’s authors, said he was not ready to give up the long-held Republican goal of repealing Obamacare despite a stunning failure to muster enough votes within the party this summer to kill the law.

In related news, former US presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders on Wednesday introduced a revolutionary plan for government-sponsored health care, a proposal that has gained traction among rising-star Democrats.

The bill has slim to no chance of passing a Republican-controlled Congress, but presents an opportunity for Democrats to stake out new policy goals in the era of President Donald Trump as they prepare for upcoming elections.

If it were to become law, the Sanders plan would create perhaps the most ambitious social welfare initiative in US history.

“Healthcare in America must be a right, not a privilege,” Sanders, joined by fellow senators as well as doctors, nurses and patients, said at the rollout of his “Medicare for All” legislation.

“Today we begin the long and difficult struggle to end the international disgrace of the United States, our great nation, being the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare to all of our people.”

While support for such a scheme has surged among prominent Democrats — including several who may launch presidential bids in 2020 — the party’s leaders are not on board with the liberal independent senator.

Sanders, whose so-called “single payer” health insurance proposal was a key part of his run against Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination, said his bill has 16 co-sponsors plus himself — more than a third of the Senate Democratic caucus.

Five potential presidential contenders — senators Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Sanders himself — attended the rollout, each offering impassioned rationales for taking the dramatic step to government-sponsored healthcare.