New Medicare Cards Coming Soon

For those who have been working in the senior insurance market the red white and blue Medicare card has been an important part of your everyday job for years. Starting in April 2018 that familiar card will be getting some changes. The new Medicare card contains a unique, randomly-assigned number that replaces the current Social Security-based number. This new identification number is called the Medicare Beneficiary Identifier (MBI).
CMS has assigned all people with Medicare benefits the new, unique Medicare number, which contains a combination of numbers and uppercase letters. People with Medicare will receive a new Medicare card in the mail, and will be instructed to safely and securely destroy their current Medicare card and keep their new Medicare number confidential. Issuance of the new number will not change benefits that people with Medicare receive.  The biggest reason Medicare is taking the SSN off of Medicare cards is to fight medical identity theft for people with Medicare. By replacing the SSN-based HICN on all Medicare cards, Medicare can better protect your private health care and financial information and federal health care benefit and service payments.

CMS will begin mailing the new cards to people with Medicare benefits in April 2018 to meet the statutory deadline for replacing all existing Medicare cards by April 2019. Medicare will mail the new Medicare cards with the MBI to all people with Medicare in phases by geographic location.

The MBI will be:

• Clearly different than the HICN and RRB number
• 11-characters in length
• Made up only of numbers and uppercase letters (no special characters)

Each MBI is unique, randomly generated, and the characters are “non-intelligent,” which means they don’t have any hidden or special meaning.

New Medicare Card

Old Medicare Card

For more information, please visit: www.cms.gov/newcard