A woman from St. Louis was reportedly told by the customer service department behind Healthcare.gov that three different people used her address, social security number, and account password. After she was clearly disgusted by the situation, administrators made it worse by saying it will take five days to get her personal information offline, detailed a News 4 official report.
ObamaCare Shutdown, Again
The Affordable Health Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare, has had its share of glitches and hold-ups. Fox News detailed a Nov 3rd shutdown for three days, when the website underwent repairs and maintenance work in response to the fraud issues and technical concerns. The Washington Post, in an interview with Health Policy Association President, Robert Laszewski, documents serious slowdowns on the website. Laszewski said the government must fix the back end before the front end, and so no further sign ups should occur before they are able to work out flawed glitches.
Safe-Guarding from ObamaCare Related Fraud
For those interested in continuing to pursue ObamaCare, preparations should be made. Companies like InsuraCare have licensed representatives to walk you through the process. All information is safeguarded until users verify that it is accurate and featured on the federal Healthcare.gov server. The company provides telephone and email guidance for navigating the often confusing nature of the resources web set-up.
Services like Lifelock allows visitors to sign up for privacy protection without a direct middle man. The service keeps detailed record of any credit issues, and will alert members if any fraudulent activity is suspected, details the Veterans of Foreign Wars Lifelock page. The service will even protect from potential data miners that attempt to seek vast pools of data from Healthcare.gov by using detailed algorithms.
Common Sense Strategies to Avoid Identity Theft
For better or worse, the best strategy may be to wait until ObamaCare works out more kinks. The Insurance Journal reports that small businesses will not be able to use healthcare.gov until November 2014. This may be somewhat of a relief for small business still transitioning in these tough economic times. Interestingly, Healthcare.gov still features an enrollment option for small business accounts, as well as detailed outlines of what coverage to choose. This includes four core plans — bronze, silver, gold, and platinum, denoting how much of the cost is shared between business and employees.
For now, users are best directed to the telephone number for added protection. Unfortunately, the vast assortment of insurance options (50-60 on average) make it difficult to navigate on the phone and users may find themselves bouncing from one representative to another, suggests the Washington Post.
CNBC reports that 99 percent of ObamaCare applicants have a fatal flaw in their application that does not allow them to move forward with a plan. Many of these are due to corrupted files being flooded through a system that can not handle the demand. In lieu of these concerns, calling and verifying the correct receiving of an application is the safest bet to confirm your data is not floating about in cyberspace.
Kevin Strauss
Kevin is a retired nurse who writes about the health care industry when he’s not busy with his five grandkids.
