Health Insurer Loses Sensitive Data on Almost a Million People

It’s a difficult month for the South. Employees and students at the University of Central Florida (UCF) were recently victims of a breach of the university’s system and now current and former customers of health insurer Centene announced it lost some computer hard drives. Those drives contained personal data totalling approximately 950,000 records including Social Security Numbers, names, addresses, birth dates, and health information. The company said that out of that number, the information on 148,334 Georgians was possibly accessed. These people were on Medicaid or PeachCare for Kids.

Centene is notifying affected individuals and is also offering free credit and health care monitoring. Anyone receiving this notification is urged to take advantage of the free services.

In addition, it’s very important that regardless of whether or not you have been a victim of this type of theft, you pay attention to your health insurance benefit statements every time you receive one. These documents contain the information about services you have received using your healthcare insurance. It’s very important that if anything looks unfamiliar, you contact your healthcare provider to get it corrected.

Since Social Security Numbers were accessed, it is also important to monitor credit reports and get anything that is incorrect looked into and corrected. Each of the three major credit bureaus must provide credit holders with one free report each year. While getting them for yourself, get them for your children too. Although you may not think they have credit, 140,000 children are victims of identity theft each year, according to ID Analytics.

The FBI says that health care fraud costs are into the tens of billions of dollars each year and rising faster than inflation. Criminals will use information gathered in these cases to get reimbursement for goods and services that were never provided. In addition, services and products in your medical file are used to determine treatments. If those are incorrect, it could lead to considerable harm or even death.

Centene does not believe the information on the missing hard drives has been used inappropriately. However, they are announcing the loss out of an “abundance of caution and transparency.” They are also continuing to search for the missing hardware.

The largest healthcare breach involved Anthem, which affected 80 million people. The Department of Health and Human Services reported that in 2015, over 112 million healthcare records were lost.