According to a report from the American Hospital Association, over $40 billion dollars in hospital bills are unpaid each year. This doesn’t include the unpaid bills to private practice physicians or other forms of non-hospital-based care. It is an enormous problem that only serves to drive up healthcare costs nationwide.

If you can’t pay your medical bills, it is better for you to make arrangements for payment, health insurance coverage, or to obtain government-sponsored coverage rather than going into debt and getting sent to a debt collector.

Verifying your identity: When you go to the hospital or a healthcare provider, you may be given a patient identifier, which is a number that identifies you within that healthcare system. However, once you leave that system and go to another hospital, you will be given a completely different number. Your Social Security number can be a way for healthcare providers and hospitals to identify you in order to share your records for planning your medical care.

As a consumer, it is not unreasonable for you to be worried about sharing your Social Security number with anyone, even a trusted family doctor. Each year, over two million people are victims of medical identity fraud in the U.S., and some of these incidents occur because a person’s Social Security and insurance information aren’t properly secured.

While your healthcare provider may be permitted to see you as a patient even if you refuse to provide your social security number, most hospitals and diagnostic facilities require that you provide it unless you are in need of emergency medical care.

If you are uncomfortable providing your social security number, there are a few things you can do to protect yourself from identity theft:

• Pay for your health care in cash upfront. In this instance, your provider may agree to a service, but they may still refuse if they are concerned that they can’t get the correct medical records without verifying your identity.
• Provide your healthcare insurance card and your medical identification number, as well as access to your medical records. This will reassure your provider that payment will be rendered and that the available medical records are accurate and up-to-date.
• Request that you provide your responses to these questions privately, away from the earshot of other patients or staff who may be nearby and who do not need to know this information.
• Track your medical bills and payments carefully. Create an online account with on your healthcare provider and/or your health insurer’s website so that you can follow up on all of your bills and payments.

Under the law, doctors cannot refuse to treat a person for ethnic, racial, or religious reasons. Nor can a doctor discriminate based on a person’s sex or sexual orientation. Outside of these protected areas, providers and hospitals are not required to accept a patient, and they are permitted to have policies that decrease the chances that a patient will not pay their medical bill.

Your privacy is our priority!