According to a recent article in Yahoo!, your medical records might be more valuable to an identity thief than your credit card info. There are a few reasons for that, but one of the most interesting is that there is a lot of money to be made from civil government healthcare handouts. And since medical records are not protected the same way credit cards and bank accounts are, such fraud can be milked for years before it is found out:

The data for sale includes names, birth dates, policy numbers, diagnosis codes and billing information. Fraudsters use this data to create fake IDs to buy medical equipment or drugs that can be resold, or they combine a patient number with a false provider number and file made-up claims with insurers, according to experts who have investigated cyber attacks on healthcare organizations.

Medical identity theft is often not immediately identified by a patient or their provider, giving criminals years to milk such credentials. That makes medical data more valuable than credit cards, which tend to be quickly canceled by banks once fraud is detected.

Did you notice that? Identity thieves might be using your medical records to file made-up insurance claims. And with the bureaucratic labyrinth that has been created by Obamacare, such fraud would just be one of myriad insurance claims for which taxpayers sre required to pay.

And Obamacare is especially suited for this kind of fraud, since checking into every insurance claim would be prohibitively expensive. Beyond that, the civil government really has no reason to check into fraudulent claims. The civil government (and insurance companies for that matter) want claims to legitimize their continued suckling at the taxpayer teat: “See how many people are relying on Obamacare? If we cut it off, who knows how many claims would go unfunded?” It probably doesn’t matter much to them if a rising percentage of those claims are based on your stolen medical records.

Welcome to the world of a million hidden costs. You’ll self-pay for medical care, pay again for someone else’s healthcare, then pay again for the shady dude who bought medical records for profit. And there was much rejoicing.