New Medicare Card-What to do and how will new MBI number look?

Centre for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) started to issue new Medicare Cards with unique new Medicare numbers. This Medicare numbers also called as Medicare Beneficiary Identifier or MBI and unique to each person with Medicare.

CMS are removing social security numbers from Medicare cards and issuing new Medicare cards with a new Medicare number. This has been implemented to eliminate the use of Social security number from Medicare cards to prevent fraud, fight identity theft and keep taxpayer dollar safe. CMS started mailing new cards to people with Medicare benefits from April 2018 thru April 2019.

How to get New Medicare Card?

You no need to do anything, Medicare has started mailing cards and new card will automatically come to you as long as your address is up to date.

If you need to update your address please visit your my social security account

https://www.ssa.gov/myaccount/

Also you can sign up below to get an email when your card is in the mail

https://www.medicare.gov/newcard/

What to do when you get your new Medicare card?

Destroy your old Medicare Card, once you get the new Medicare card and start using the new Medicare card right away.

How will the new MBI Look?

The MBI format is 11 characters is length, which is randomly generated and contains numbers and uppercase letters. This makes its different from HICN and RRB number.

The characters used in the MBI will be numbers from 0-9 and all letters from A to Z except the characters S, L, O, I, B AND Z. This letters were excluded to avoid confusion between some letters and numbers. This will also make all the characters easier to read.

As we already stated the MBI contains both letters and numbers

Here is an example:

1EG4-TE5-MK73

The MBI 1^st, 4^th, 7^th, 10th and 11^th characters will always be a number

Characters 2^nd, 5^th, 8^th and 9^th will always be a letter

The 3^rd and 6^th Characters will be letter or a number.

MBI FORMAT