A family in Cumming spent five months trying to figure out who got an MRI and stuck them with a $3,700.00 bill.

The 11Alive Investigators discovered it’s up to you to clear those bad medical bills, and that could take months of frustrating work.

“I was just shocked,” Cathy James told 11Alive Chief Investigator Brendan Keefe. “What we thought was going to take a week at most to fix, took five months.”

Cathy James showed Keefe the hospital bill for her husband’s MRI of the spine. But her husband wasn’t at Northside Hospital on that date. He was 40 miles away, and the family was on the hook for the $1500 deductible for a stranger’s MRI.

​“It’s not ours,” James said. “I don’t have $1500 to pay you. I can’t pay you. Somebody needs to fix this and make it right and find out what actually happened.”

She said Northside Hospital insisted her husband had the procedure. The family immediately called the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office.

The police report says Mr. James “was out of town” and it “appears that his I.D. and insurance information were used to receive a medical procedure” and the hospital “had not taken any I.D.”

“I asked the lady behind the counter, ‘Just out of curiosity do you have to have a photo I.D.? If someone comes in for a procedure and they don’t have a photo I.D., will you still preform the procedure?’ She said yes. They don’t have to have a photo I.D., they don’t have to have an insurance card,” James said.

Northside Hospital told the 11Alive Investigators: “We always ask for identification. However, there are legal requirements that prevent us from refusing patient care on the basis patients have no identification.”

Eighty million Americans were exposed to a massive data breach when Anthem Inc., the nation’s second-largest insurance company, became a victim of a “very sophisticated” cyber attack. And last month, the health information of another 150,000 Georgians was lost by a state contractor that has six missing hard drives. With rising medical costs, there’s a huge incentive for a thief to use someone else’s insurance to bypass paying for co-pays and deductibles.

According to a study published last year by ID Experts, 65 percent of medical identity theft victims has to pay an average of $13,500 to resolve their case. Even if you do avoid becoming a victim of fraud, so called “keystroke errors” are among the top medical mistakes in both treatment and billing.

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February 29, 2016 By Brendan Keefe, 11Alive Atlanta WXIA NBC