What is a Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI)? The MBI is what will be replacing Social Security numbers on Medicare cards. All Medicare beneficiaries will be assigned a MBI and sent a new card. Starting around April 2018, CMS will start mailing the new Medicare cards. There are currently over 60 million Medicare beneficiaries who will be assigned a new MBI, so CMS will likely mail the cards in phases.

The primary goal of the initiative is to decrease Medicare beneficiaries’ vulnerability to identity theft by removing the Social Security number from their Medicare cards and replacing it with a new Medicare MBI, which does not contain any other personal information.

Some of the characteristics of the Medicare Beneficiary Identifier are:

-Unique to each beneficiary – husband and wife will have their own number.

– Contain upper alphabetic and numeric characters.

– Be easy to read and limit the possibility of letters being interpreted as numbers (e.g. alphabetic characters are upper case only and will exclude S, L, O, I, B, Z).

– Not contain any embedded intelligence or special characters.

This upcoming change has already caused confusion for beneficiaries and scammers love to take advantage of confusion. Here are some facts about the new Medicare cards:

– Your new Medicare card will automatically be sent to you. You do not need to reapply for Medicare.

– When CMS issues your new card, they will mail it to you. They will NOT call asking for identifying information relating to the issuance of the new Medicare card. They will NOT call asking you to confirm your Medicare number (Social Security) before sending you a new card.

– There is not a fee for your new Medicare card. Do not provide anyone with payment or checking/savings account information to pay for a new card.

If a beneficiary or caregiver has any questions, please contact the ND SMP at ndsmp@minotstateu.edu or 1-800-233-1737.