Medicare card delivery problems raise identity theft concerns
Technical problem resulted in 116 cards being sent to 24 wrong addresses
Service New Brunswick is hoping more than 500 people will soon be in possession of their Medicare health cards — months after a serious technical glitch.
In early December, a technical problem resulted in 116 such cards being sent to 24 wrong addresses — another 400 were destroyed before they were mailed out.
One of the people affected was George Butters of Fredericton.
He received his card on Monday — almost three months after he sent in his renewal — but he can't get any information from the health department.
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"I still don't know if my card went to the wrong person or if it was one of the 400 that was supposedly destroyed after the discovered the problem," he said.
Butters said if the wrong person received his health card, the information on it could lead to identity theft.
"It has my full name, it has my date of birth and it has my medicare number. And I haven't been able to find out if I was one of the people whose information was exposed to somebody else," he said.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner said it is looking into the matter.