 In an entirely different vein, government regulators and the general public characterize identity theft as a “privacy” problem (Allen 2011). In recent years identify theft has become a privacy problem in the delivery of health care. Because of the high price of health care, medical identity theft—receiving medical care using others’ personal data for billing purposes—has become a serious problem. Consumers must worry both about the confidentiality of their medical records and physician encounters, and about the possibility that someone will appropriate their personal identifiers and then use them to defraud health care providers and insurers.