It’s scary when you hear about a friend or family member who has dealt with identity theft or fraud, but we are here to ease your mind with these 5 steps to master your medicare and prevent medicare fraud.
- Protect your Information: Be careful with who you send out your personal information to (like your social security number). Every year, millions of people have to deal with identity theft and you do not want to be one of them! Read up on what tactics the scammers have been using lately, especially since the seniors are one of the most targeted groups for scammers!
- Know your Medicare Rights: Some of your medicare rights include protection from discrimination, your personal and health information kept private, access to doctors and specialists, medicare-covered services when an emergency occurs, and more.
- Stay Up-To-Date With the Senior Medicare Patrol: The Senior Medicare Patrol is a group where seniors help each other with finding and stopping health care scamming and errors. The program focuses on medicare fraud education, engaging volunteers, and obtaining beneficiary complaints. Check out https://www.smpresource.org/ for more information.
- Stay Knowledgeable About Your Medicare Plans: During the yearly open enrollment period, make sure you know what plan you have and see if you need to move to a different plan. We’d love to help you with analyzing your Medicare plan, so click here to contact us now.
- Protect Your Medicare Card: Before April 2018, your Medicare number was based on a Social Security number, but now, Medicare has replaced the social security- based medicare number with a new Medicare number ( by separating the two, it will make it harder for thieves to obtain both numbers). Remember, protect your Medicare number like you’d protect your Credit Card number and always check your Medicare statement for errors.
