Why Chinese Hackers Would Want US Hospital Patient Data 171
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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... [cbsnews.com]
uh-huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Are there documented cases where the uninsured poor have bought blackmarket medical records to get healthcare? This seem preposterous.
I'm not so sure.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Time for medicare for all in the usa (Score:1, Insightful)
Ok, so you're going to pay for it, right? Why don't all you people who think this way just ante up and maybe the rest of us won't have to suffer for it? Why do you need to wait for the government to wrestle those greenbacks from your wallet and act like you're powerless to do it today? Put your money where your mouth is or shut up.
Personally, I'm sick of fighting tooth and nail to keep my wages in this job market and all the while paying for record high numbers of people on welfare of one form or another, paying other countries to play nice with one another and policing those that won't while the two-party scam tries to convince us that the economy is doing great with numbers that any idiot could see are skewed.
Re:Time for medicare for all in the usa (Score:4, Insightful)
What unemployment thing? We are a few tenths of a percentage point behind the US on unemployment, nothing major.
Re:Time for medicare for all in the usa (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't pay taxes?
It isn't free, it is just that your money that you are paying is being placed in an other category.
Re:Time for medicare for all in the usa (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't be daft. You are paying for your medical care in your tax bill and in all the other goods and services you buy that have taxes embedded in their prices.
There is no free lunch (2nd law of thermodynamics).
Re:Time for medicare for all in the usa (Score:2, Insightful)
Please fact-check before throwing negative comments someones way.
US Unemploymnent : 6.3%
UK Unemploymnent : 6.4%
Re:Time for medicare for all in the usa (Score:4, Insightful)
I never said it was free, but we all pay taxes while only some of us don't have to fork out ridiculous additional sums for medical cover.
For example, I will never be hit with a bill for medical treatments my insurance won't cover. There isn't a moment I have to worry about getting charged for my stay in hospital. I don't have to worry about whether my insurance will cover the drugs my doctor has prescribed me, the most I will pay is £8.05, even if the drug costs £10,000 a course.
Re:Time for medicare for all in the usa (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, because the single payer systems in Europe of trouble free right?
I'm not saying we don't have an issue, but your 1 step solution is a joke. The same corruption, greed and poor administration that afflicts us now would continue in the new system. It would just include all the problems of government waste and politics as well.
"Government waste"? Every other health care system in the world has lower costs that the US as a percentage of GDP and per capita:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jun/30/healthcare-spending-world-country
You would reduce waste by going with single-payer.
And these costs don't even get the US the highest life expectancy or lowest child mortality rates.
I'm sure there are good arguments against single payer, but worries about waste are not one of them.
Re:Time for medicare for all in the usa (Score:5, Insightful)
"Yes, because the single payer systems in Europe of trouble free right?"
1) Where did the OP claim that it was trouble free?
2) Why does it have to be trouble free before it can be useful?
Re:Uninsured? (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re:Uninsured? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?