Bill > HR380

This bill, the Medicare Identity Theft Prevention Act of 2015, aims to protect Medicare beneficiaries from identity theft by prohibiting the use of Social Security account numbers (SSNs) on Medicare cards. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is directed to establish cost-effective procedures to ensure that SSNs, or any part of them, are not displayed, coded, or embedded on Medicare cards. Additionally, any other identifier on the card must not be recognizable as an SSN. The bill also outlines implementation steps, including providing assistance to beneficiaries and healthcare providers through toll-free numbers and outreach, and considers using a separate Medicare beneficiary identifier that can be internally converted to an SSN. Funding for these changes will be transferred from the Federal Hospital Insurance Trust Fund and the Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Fund to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Program Management Account and the Social Security Administration Limitation on Administration Account, with specific amounts allocated for fiscal years 2015 through 2018. The changes will apply to Medicare cards issued on or after a date set by the Secretary, no later than four years after the bill's enactment, and existing cards must be reissued within four years of that effective date.