New Medicare Beneficiary ID Card to Enhance Security

Medicare is less than a year away from debuting a new beneficiary card that strips out Social Security numbers to protect against identity theft.

The new cards will be mailed to beneficiaries in April 2018 and will replace the Social Security number-based Health Insurance Claim Number (HICN) with a randomly generated Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI).

Medicare will accept both the HICN and the MBI until December 2019, but providers and insurers must be ready to accept the new MBIs by April 2018, according to a May 30 notice from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Shifting data systems to ...