Mentor: Albert Castelo

Empire State College

Research and Writing

                                                                                                            April 08, 2008

HEALTH CARE PLANS

In 1990, the New York State Legislature created a health plan for children of families with low to no income for New York State residence. This plan is called the Child Health Plus Plan. To be eligible to qualify, the child had to be 13 years old or younger, uninsured or underinsured, and not eligible for State Medicaid benefits. Children in a family with an income below 222% FPL (Federal Poverty Level -Poverty threshold for 2007 is by size of the family and number of related children) are eligible for an income –variable premium subsidy (premium subsidized by what a persons or families income is). Children in families above the 222% FPL are permitted to buy into the program without any premium subsidy. By August 1991, the children began receiving coverage from the program. By 1993, 37% of the children that lived in New York State and were eligible enrolled in the Child Health Plus program. In 1997, the program expanded to include children up to the age of 19 years old.

The New York State Child Health Plus Plan is the largest non-Medicaid, tax funded health plan in the country. At the time of this report (conducted in the summer of 1997 by The Rochester Child Health Studies) the New York State Department of Health stated that there were fifteen insurance companies that participated in the program, and the program covered over 135,000 children and they had projections of coverage for over 250,000 children in the next couple of years. In 1997, a survey by the Bureau of the Census computed that there were 399,000, 19 year old or younger children who resided in New York State that were in the 200% FPL and were not covered by any type of insurance at all. The program has four tiers that are established as the premium components. For families in the 0% – 120% of the poverty level there is no monthly premium, for families in the 120% – 159% of the poverty level would be required to pay a premium of $9 a month per child up to a maximum of $36, families in the 160% -222% of the poverty level would be required to pay a premium of $13 a month per child up to a maximum of $52 and the last tier is for families who are in the 222% or above of the FPL, they would be required to pay a premium of $58 to $99 a month per member. (See Appendix “A”) The plan also offers a very reasonable co – payment plan for participants of the program. Example: A doctors visits would cost $2. The Families participating in the program are given a list of the doctors that are enrolled in the program. For child well and inpatient care visits, there are no co-payments at all. For prescription drugs and nutritional supplements there is only a $1to $3 co-payment. (See Appendix “B”)    

In most cases, participants are permitted to use doctors that are in the program and are located in areas in which they live. The plan has been in existence since 1991 and seems to be a very good program that has all the right options for people who are of low to no income.  

As reported in the American Academy of Pediatrics survey conducted in Decemeber 1999, the cost of health care for children are above normal in the first year, however, once the child began to recieve regular medical care, the child was less prone to long term illness or other treatable illnesses and the cost is reduced. As is commom knowledge, when someone maintains thier health they tend to get sick less and need less medical attention. Therefore, the cost in the long term becomes less.       

FAMILY  HEALTH CARE PLUS

            This is another plan that is available to the public, adults with or without children can apply for Family Health Plus through Heath Plus. To be able to qualify for Family Health Plus you must be between the ages of 19 and 64, a New York State resident, a citizen of the United States or have citizen status, have no insurance and not be eligible for Medicaid.    

            There are no charges to join Family Health Plus, if you have children under 19, they may be eligible for Child Heath Plus.

            Family Health Plus was established in 1984 by Luthern Medical Center in Brooklyn to give people a coordinated quality health care to the unisured in the SouthWest Brooklyn district. Family Health Plus now serves all five boroughs, Nassau county and approxiamately 270,000 people. The premiums for Family Health Care Plus are resonable. To qualify below are some of the  rates:

Single adults earning under $10,400 a year

Couples w/ no children earning under $14,000 a year

Families with 1 child earning under $21,000 a year

Families with 2 children earning under $26,400 a year

Families with 3 children earning under $31,800 a year

Families with 4 children earning under $37,200 a year

Families with 5 children earning under $42,600 a year (See Appendix “C”)

HEALTH CARE PLUS

               Also there is a plan called Health Plus, this plan has been offered to New York State residence since 1984 and is a managed Medicaid care program. This plan requires that the participants use doctors, clinics and hospitals that are registered in the plan. This plan is use to cover people who are without insurance until they are either eligilbe for Medicaid or get insurance from another means. Enrollement in the Medicaid health plan is on a voluntary basis until you receive an officail notice from New York Medicaid Choice that you must enroll in a health plan. You may choose to remain fee for service Medcaid until your family receives a mandatory notice from New York Medicaid Choice. New borns are automatically enrolled in the plan of the mother.   

            During an annual survey conducted by Health Care, it was found that 91% of the people that were covered by Health Care Plus etc, thought that the care provided was excellent and 93% of the people surveyed thought the the coverage and care were anywhere from good to best.

            With programs like Child Health Plus, Family Health Plus, and Health Care Plus, there seems to be  health coverage for all the different and diverse groups that New york State has within its borders. These health plans coverchildren, young adults, middle aged, and people reaching their golden years. Once a person becomes 65 and older, that person is eligible for Medicare or Medicaid. There is also Health care Plus that provides health coverage for people that do not have coverage and fall into an undetermined category. Once it is determined what type of coverage fits this persons needs or this families needs, they are then switched to that coverage. I’m sure there are things wrong with the three coverages that I have addressed, however, these porgrams have what appears to be a solid foundation to work with. I’m sure that these three insurance coverages could be used to benefit all Americans.

            Then there is the issue of people falling in the categories that are not in the ranges indicated above. I feel that companies employing 50 people or more with salaries in the same salary structure as appendix “C” should be required to insure their workers have health insurnce. Companies that employ 49 people or less with the same salary structure as aapendix “C” would receive a voucher indicating how many employees that work for that company and they would be partially subsidised by the government and the rest of the cost would have to come from the company.

            I am a realist and I do know that in a country with as many people in it as the United States has, that there will always be people who will not have health insurance, and most of those people will be the illegal immigrants that reside in our country. Unless we stop illegal immigrants from entering our country this will always be a problems, therefore, some of the surveys conducted can not be truly accurate because they include prople who do not have legal status within our country. Taxes are our most resourceful means of helping people who do not have the resources to help themselves and unless we ensure that all people that work pay taxes, there will be no way to monitor all the people who do not have health coverage.

            According to a national poll dated March 02, 2007, that was conducted by “The New York Times” and “CBS News” on February 23 to February 27, 2008, most Americans feels that it is the responsibility of the government to ensure that all families have some type of health coverage. The Americans polled stated that they would be willing to have their income taxes raise to as much as $500.00 a year to help the government guarantee health insurance for all families, especially for children. Also documented was the statistic that there are 47 million people in the United States that have no health insurance of any kind. This is an increase from 2000, which was at 6.8 million people. Eighty – Four percent of the people surveyed supported the current program to cover all uninsured children, which is now presumed to be nearly at 8 million.   

            My proposal would be for the New York State Child Health Plus program to be a consideration as the next national health care plan. The plans have been in existence since 1984 and seem to be a very good program that has all the right options for people who are of low to no income. The program can offer people a viable means of insurance and still be not much of a burden to the general public when it comes to increasing taxes.  

Appendix “A”

Appendix “B”

Co- Payments

Appendix “C”

Works Cited

American Academy of Pediatrics – 2000

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org

New York State Family Health Plan – January 2008

http://www.health.state.ny.us/nysdoh/fhplus/who_can_join.htm

New York State Department of Health

http://www.health.state.ny.us/nysdoh

New York State Health Plus Corpoate Compliance.  2007

 http://www.healthplus-ny.org/en/6927_ENG_HTML.html

The New York Times.com/ Washington Poll

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/02washington/02poll.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The Rochester Child Health Studies

http://aspe.os.dhhs.gov/health/schip/States/New _York.html

http://www.healthcareplus-ny.org

Mentor: Albert Castelo

Empire State College

Research and Writing

                                                                                                            April 26, 2008

IDENTITY THEFT

Definition of Identity Theft: New York State Penal law (Section 190.77)

A person is guilty of identity theft when he or she knowingly and with intent to defraud assumes the identity of another person by presenting himself or herself as that person, or by acting as that other person or by using personal identifying information of that other person, and thereby obtains goods, money, property, or services or uses credit in the name of such other person or causes financial loss to such person or to another person or persons.

            Identity theft in most states makes it a crime to misuse another person’s identifying information- whether personal or financial. Such data (including Social Security number, credit history, and PIN numbers) is often acquired through the offenders’ unlawful access to information from government and financial entities or lost or stolen mail, wallets, purses, identification, and credit or debit cards.

            Above are legal terms for identity theft. This is how the crime is written up when a person has been arrested and charged with identity theft.

In layman’s terms most people consider identity theft a crime much more personal than how it is written in the law, they consider identity theft to be a violation of their good name, a crime that not only ruined their financial status, but took the good name they worked so hard to establish and just threw it away. To re-establish your name in good faith with financial institutions may take years of diligent and hard work.

            Below are some of the methods that are used by criminals to get hold of your personal information:

1.      Shoulder Surfing

2.      Dumpster diving

3.      Stealing your mail

4.      Phishing

5.      Vishing

6.      Personal information that was inappropriately disposed of or stolen from your place of employment.

7.      Credit card information stolen at restaurants or other retail companies.

Shoulder Surfing:

This occurs when someone looks over your shoulder or takes video from their cell phone of a person entering a PIN number into an ATM or other debit card machine.

Dumpster Diving:

This occurs when someone goes through your garbage and finds information that can be used to establish your identity. A second type of dumpster diving is at financial institutions; this is when people discard their ATM receipt without tearing it up. This information tells the criminal how much money is in your account and gives them a reason to target you.

Stealing your mail:

This is when someone goes through your mail and takes what they think will be helpful to them for the purpose of personal information. Bank statements, credit card bills etc.

Phishing:

This is a very common way to get people to offer their personal information and the criminal never has to leave the security and comfort of his or her surroundings. Phishing is when someone receives unsolicited e-mails regarding the reasons below. There are numerous ways that criminals use the computer to phish for your information.

·        There are the fake work sites, work at home sites that tell you that you can earn $3,000 a month. With these sites there is an application to fill out and all of your information is requested, from there the rest is easy. 

·         There are fake financial sites that invite you to get a low interest loan. Again you apply for a loan and all of your information is used to create an identity using your name.

·        There are sites that look the same as a particular financial institution and tell you that they are updating their records and they need you to verify your account and correct what is incorrect. These sites are created to make you believe that you are on your banks site and all of your information is stored in a criminal’s database. With these sites the criminals randomly send them out to thousands of people each day and expect about a 1% to 2% hit.

·        There are sites that invite you to get a free credit card and a free a free credit score. These sites also require you to fill out information that should not be disclosed to anyone that is soliciting this information.

Vishing:

This is almost the same as Phishing, however, instead of soliciting your information over the internet, the criminal(s) send thousands of e-mails stating “We would never request personal information over the internet, please call us and speak to one of our friendly customer services agents to ensure your account information is correct with us”.  The con instructs you to call what appears to be a legitimate 800 number and instead of soliciting your information over the Internet, people talk to someone and give out all their information over the phone. It seems that people are becoming more aware of the Phishing scam and are more reluctant to give out personal information over the Internet, but when they hear a voice they become more trusting and that should not be the case. Cons best attribute is their ability to talk people into doing things they really aren’t that comfortable doing. 

Papers or Data stolen or disposed of inappropriately:

This is when someone works for a company and is paid a fee for them to gather personal information from accounts and give that information to another party who in turn uses or sells it for the purposes of identity theft. There is also the improper disposal of confidential information by companies that don’t use professional paper shredding companies and they don’t insure that employees shred documents with shredding machines located at the place of employment.

Credit card information stolen at restaurants or other retail companies:

This usually occurs at restaurants, this is when someone pays for a meal by credit card. The employee of the establishment takes your card from you walks away and comes back a few minutes later with the receipt. However, when that employee had your credit card they scanned it into another machine that they have attached to their body and this machine gathers all the information of the credit card onto it. The employee now goes home and downloads all of that information on to their home computer that has software, which is capable to decrypt all the information on that card so they are able to read everything needed to use it. This applies for other establishments; the only thing different is the employee doesn’t get such freedom with your card once it is handed to them.

                        Monitoring identity theft can be difficult because different states, different police departments, different federal agencies all document identity theft differently. Some agencies document any type of financial or documental information that was used by another person as identity theft; other agencies only document the cases that someone used actual documents to falsely create and steal another person’s identity. This is one of the reasons that the statistics for this crime are so different from agency to agency.

            The Federal Bureau of Investigations state “This is one of the fastest growing crimes in the United States and estimates that there are 500,000 to 700,000 Americans who are victims of identity theft each year”. According to two studies conducted in July 2003, one by Gartner Research and the other by Harris Interactive, approximately 7 – 10 million people had their identities stolen in the prior 12 months. The Bureau of Justice states that data of a survey conducted in July 2004, by the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) reveals that there were about 1.6 million households that were victims of identity theft in the prior year. This does not include credit cards, the further states that 6.4 million households had at least one member of that household was a victim of identity theft if a credit card was the means. The United States Post Office estimates the number to be closer to 9.9 million victims a year, costing roughly 5 billion dollars.

            Another staggering statistic is that your information is sold at such cheap rates that it makes it so easy for anyone to buy this information and use it against you.

For example:

Regular credit card number: $1

Credit card number with 3-digit security code: $3-$5.                

Credit card with code and PIN: $10-$100

Social Security Number (US): $5-$10

Mother’s maiden name: $5-$10

            I have been a Fraud Investigator for 3 years for the Credit Union I work for. In my experience with identity theft I found that most identity theft are committed by people who either know the victim or have access to the victims’ personal information on a daily basis. Victims of random fraud are not as frequent as you would tend to believe.

For example:

            In 2007, I had a claim from one of our members (a client in a credit union is considered a member). She stated that she was a victim of check fraud and credit card fraud. The claim had 18 checks that were forged against her checking account for almost $17,000 and another $20,000 in credit card fraud. After I received that claim, I began gathering all the documents that were used to defraud our member. I was able to get all the check transactions and get copies of all of the checks. On the front of the checks, the payee was written to the same person. On the back of the checks, all of the checks were deposited into the same bank. I did a name check of the payee and found that this person resided at the same address as our member (the victim). I then spoke to a fraud investigator in the other bank and found that all of the checks were in fact deposited into this persons account with that institution. Again, our credit card investigator was able to determine what charges were made and the location of some items that were to be delivered. Other investigations showed that the victim’s card was being used to pay off other credit card debts, all to the accounts of the same person. All of this information led to the same name and the same location. As it turns out, this person who committed the credit card fraud was the boyfriend of our member’s (the victims) mother. Also all the checks were deposited into our member’s (the victim) mother’s account with that other financial institution that I mentioned. After being informed by the police that they were able to identify the person who made the deposits into the other banks account (by video), we found that it was once again the boyfriend of our member’s mother. At this point the perpetrator was arrested.

      Another example is, one day in 2006, I was informed by one of our branch managers that she was uncomfortable with the amount of transactions that were occurring from one of our accounts. This member never made over the counter withdrawals from this location before and now there were four transactions in the last four days. I asked the manager for the account information, requested a description of the person making the withdrawals, along with the dates and times. I than began to gather information of our member, I then began downloading video of the person making the withdrawals from the account. At this point I was easily able to find that the person making the withdrawals was in fact not our member. At this point I informed the manager of the branch to call me at once when this person came back to make another withdrawal. On the very next day the unsuspecting perpetrator came to make another withdrawal, the manager called me and I informed her to call the police. We were able to keep the perpetrator at the branch by telling him that we needed to get approval of the withdrawal because of the frequency of withdrawals in the past couple of days. A few minutes later the police arrive, I was able to get in-touch with our member to inform him of what was happening to his account and instructed him that we had the person, but we needed to know that he would press charges. He informed me that he would press charges and we had the perpetrator arrested for all related charges. After further review of the case, we thought that the teller had knowledge of the circumstances and was abetting the perpetrator. Unfortunately we were not able to establish this with the district attorneys office and we could not press charges against the teller. However, we were able to fire the teller for failure to follow protocol when conducting transactions. 

            As I mentioned before in this essay; I find that most bank fraud are geared more toward people who are victimized by others who have a relationship with the victim or have access to the victims information everyday and is trusted to maintained the confidentiality of the information. As for credit card fraud, I find that most of these victims are more random, because of the inter-net and other means of distributing this information by the victim. 

Steps that you can take to decrease your chances of being a victim are: 

·        Secure your personal papers in a locked box in your house.

·        Don’t carry your social security card in your wallet.

·        Shred any papers that have identifying information on them, no matter how insufficient you may think they are.

·        Instead of giving your checking account information for an inter-net transaction, open a credit card with a maximum balance of $500 and use that card for any inter-net purchases.

·        Don’t give your debit card with the PIN to anyone unless you are 100% sure you can trust that person.

·        Don’t put your social security number on any web site for any reason. If you need to open an account go to the bank and do it in person.

·        Check your monthly bank statements and verify all transactions.

·        Check all your credit card bills every month.

·        Create an account with the three Credit Card Bureaus: Equifax, Experian, TransUnion, by doing this it creates a watchdog for you whenever your personal information is used for any reason.

If you do become a victim of identity theft, make sure you call all of the companies to which the fraud was committed against and stop the means of the fraud.

           No one can promise you that you won’t become a victim of identity theft but if you use precautions, you can limit the damage that it will cause and prevent it from getting out of hand.  

WORKS CITED

Bureau of Justice Statistics

            www.ojp.usjoj.gov/bjs/

                        Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

            http://www.bos.frb.org/consumer/identity/idtheft.htm

FindLaw For The Public

http://criminal.findlaw.com/crimes/a-z/identity_theft.html

                        Identity Theft Resource Center 

http://www.idtheftcenter.org/

           Identity Theft Spy (Categories – Statistics)

http://www.identitytheftspy.com/     

United States Department of Justice

http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/fraud/websites/idtheft.html

           United States Postal Service -Postal Inspectors

            http://www.usps.com/postalinspectors/idthft_ncpw.htm

  Identity Theft Resource Center®, Nonprofit Organization

Identity Theft Resource Center® (ITRC) is a nonprofit, nationally respected organization dedicated exclusively to the understanding and prevention of identity theft.  The ITRC provides consumer and victim support as well as public education.  The ITRC also advises governmental agencies, legislators, law enforcement, and businesses about the evolving and growing problem of identity theft.

Welcome to FindLaw for the Public

The Postal Inspection Service is one of the oldest federal law enforcement agencies. As the investigative and security arm of the U.S. Postal Service, it is responsible for protecting employees and assets, administering security and crime prevention programs, and enforcing criminal and civil statutes against individuals who attack the postal system and misuse it to defraud, endanger, or otherwise threaten the American public.

          Identity Theft is one of the most prevelant crimes committed in America today. People make it so easy for others to obtain thier identity without even realizing it. There are so many things that we can do to educate our public to slow this crime to a screeching halt. Let’s get working and start educating.