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When Bad Guys Get Sick
The Joe Ryan who checked into Littleton Adventist Hospital for surgery in May 2003 was actually Joe Henslik, a career bank robber, check forger and con artist with a long prison record. In 2000, Henslik was paroled from Colorado's Bent County Correctional Facility. He moved into the Centennial, Colorado, home of Jerry and Laurie Lips, whose son Justin had been a prison-mate of Henslik's.Jerry owned Airport Journals, a publisher of aviation trade papers; soon Henslik was working there as an ad salesman. He obtained private information about Ryan, alleges Deputy District Attorney Brian Sugioka, when Ryan called to place an ad. Recalls the real Ryan: "He said send along a birth date and Social Security number with the check, and like an idiot, I did."
Two years later, the first hospital bill arrived. "I wanted to help straighten this out," says Ryan, "so I went to the hospital, and they had a three-inch-thick record for me, but they wouldn't let me see it. I showed them my ID, and they said that's not Joe Ryan's signature. Well, of course not! They had this other guy's signature."
Ryan had fallen into a victim's Catch-22: If your record doesn't appear to be yours, you may not have the right to see it, much less change it. The 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) gives patients broad privacy rights, as well as the right to examine their own medical records. But patients don't necessarily have the right to correct errors or even prevent errors from being passed along to other providers.
That's because health care providers aren't required to amend records that did not originate with them. Victims can spend years expunging bad entries only to discover a mistake that reappears later -- transferred from a record that wasn't noticed earlier.
Doctors are understandably reluctant to expunge any medical information from a file, because it could expose them to liability. For example, if a physician prescribed OxyContin for severe back pain, and the back pain wasn't in the patient's record, officials could question the reason for the prescription, which would still be on file at the pharmacy.
Ryan's next step was a visit to the Littleton Police Department, which conducted an initial investigation that included a recorded phone admission by Henslik. But the cops concluded there was not much they could do; local law enforcement has little experience with medical ID theft, and cases can end up being considered a civil matter.
Frustrated, Ryan went to the district attorney's office, but by then, Henslik was hospitalized under his own name with cancer (he died last December).
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