Slashdot Mirror
Why Chinese Hackers Would Want US Hospital Patient Data
itwbennett (1594911) writes In a follow-up to yesterday's story about the Chinese hackers who stole hospital data of 4.5 million patients, IDG News Service's Martyn Williams set out to learn why the data, which didn't include credit card information, was so valuable. The answer is depressingly simple: people without health insurance can potentially get treatment by using medical data of one of the hacking victims. John Halamka, chief information officer of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network, said a medical record can be worth between $50 and $250 to the right customer — many times more than the amount typically paid for a credit card number, or the cents paid for a user name and password. "If I am one of the 50 million Americans who are uninsured ... and I need a million-dollar heart transplant, for $250 I can get a complete medical record including insurance company details," he said.
Time for medicare for all in the usa also the million-dollar heart transplant is loaded with markup where you can likely go out side of the usa and pay way less for it.
also due to court rulings in favor of inmate care you can just go to prison / jail to get one as well.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pr...
Are there documented cases where the uninsured poor have bought blackmarket medical records to get healthcare? This seem preposterous.
The thesis is that you can waltz into a doctor's office AND a hospital with faked records and get the treatment needed. Basically the important bit is the insurance info - what has happened to "you" is less important than what you want to eventually happen to you (in the example given, a heart transplant).
I kinda doubt this, at least in a general sense. First off, you can show all the insurance cards and 'insurance info' to the medical provider all you want. The provider is going to query the insurance company before doing anything expensive. Fine, you say, call them all you want, the 'patient' is insured (it's just not the right patient). Now comes the hard part. The minute that the insurance company starts getting claims from both Peoria and Trenton, NJ flags are going to go up. Other old records would be sought (for something big like a transplant or joint replacement) which would likely not match.
Anything remotely resembling a heart transplant is going to fall apart unless both the real and fake patient have nearly identical physiques, ages and problems. More routine issues could go undetected for a while but persistent discrepancies would show up and as soon as the insurance company flagged the claim as problematic, big ticket items would be placed on hold until things go cleared up. When I worked in an early Medicaid HMO in the 1980's we had some problems with folks 'sharing' the Medicaid ID card (no picture, just a printout basically). It was pretty obvious when the patient's weight varied 30 pounds every other week. We soon insisted on photo ID.
And, in fact, the feds also insist on photo ID these days. Yes, if you're bleeding out we don't ask for it up front but as soon as your blood pressure normalizes we're poking around to figure out just who you are.
So it's possible that that full on medical records might be of value, but it's going to be much harder to monetize than a credit card number and likely would be of limited use. That doesn't mean that the information shouldn't be sealed up, of course. I'm just not sure how big a deal this is. And, in the case of the Community breach, they apparently did not get that information anyway.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
More than 7 million people now have insurance because of Obamacare.
That's 7 million more people than would be insured under the Republic plan of "Fuck you. Walk it off."
Too bad we couldn't fix it the right way. But that would be eeeeevil soshialisums even more than the not-actually-socialism socialism that Obamacare put into place.
The poor should just die in the streets of preventable illnesses, right?