Effective April 2018 Medicare will start sending new Medicare Cards. Medicare will no longer use the Social Security number on your Medicare card. With feedback from providers and the spike in identity theft, Medicare has decided that it makes sense to change the current practice. With the passage of MACRA “Medicare Access and Children’s Health Insurance Program Re-authorization ACT of 2015” the changes will be phased in over a from April 2018 to December 31, 2019.
The new cards will have a randomly generated Medicare Beneficiary Identifier. They will be 11 characters long and be a mixture of numbers and upper case letters.
