The second film showed the same mouth, but the dental work was completely different. There was a crown I had never had, a filling in a tooth that had never needed one, and an extraction on the opposite side from where I’d had mine. The dentist pulled up the digital record and showed me that the 2019 image had been uploaded under my name and birthday, but the treatment notes belonged to someone else. I asked him who had provided the information, and he said the file had been created by someone using my insurance details.
He printed the treatment history for me. There were appointments I had never attended, procedures I had never had, and payments made through an insurance account connected to my name. The strangest part was that the patient had apparently been coming to the same office for nearly two years before the dentist noticed the discrepancy. I asked why nobody had questioned the fact that I hadn’t been there, and he said the person had always arrived with identification that matched the information in the system.
I called my insurance company from the office. They confirmed that several claims had been submitted using my information, but the representative wouldn’t discuss the patient without an investigation. Then the dentist opened the oldest version of the file and found a scanned document attached to it. It was a photocopy of a driver’s license, and the photograph wasn’t me. The name was mine, the birthday was mine, but the address belonged to a house I had never lived in.
I was about to leave when the dentist turned the second X-ray over and pointed to something written on the sleeve. It was a handwritten note from 2019 with my name and a phone number I didn’t recognize. He called the number from the office, and a woman answered. The dentist asked if she knew my name, and she immediately went silent. Then she asked who was calling. When he told her, she said, “I wondered how long it would take before you found out I’d been using your identity.”
