Last week, President Barack Obama signed the "doc fix" bill to repeal the sustainable growth rate. A provision of the newly signed bill requires Social Security numbers to be removed from Medicare beneficiaries' cards as a measure to protect patient identities and reduce the risk of identity theft.
According to the bill, HHS will be required to work with the Commissioner of Social Security to "establish cost-effective procedures to ensure that a Social Security account number (or derivative thereof) is not displayed, coded or embedded on the Medicare card" for beneficiaries.
Many private payers have already stopped identifying beneficiaries using Social Security numbers, and the federal government prohibits private payers from including them on insurance cards when providing medical or drug benefits under contract with Medicare, but Medicare still continued to print the numbers on cards of its own members, according to a New York Times article.
Congress has allocated $320 million over four years to remove the numbers from Medicare cards.
According to the NYT, Medicare officials have proposed using a "randomly generated Medicare beneficiary identifier" as a means to identify individuals, but details are not yet finalized.
More articles on the sustainable growth rate:
Fitch: SGR replacement reinforces move toward value-based care
The 'doc fix' bill and health IT: 5 things to know
CMS: 'Doc fix' is not a long-term solution to physician payment problem