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 "The delay in notifying those impacted is unreasonable and is
causing unnecessary added worry to an already concerned population
of Anthem customers," said the letter, which was sent on Tuesday by
Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen on behalf of Connecticut
and nine other states.
The letter asked the No. 2 U.S. health insurer to compensate any
consumers who are victims of scams, if the fraud occurs before
Anthem notifies them of the breach, and offer them free credit
monitoring.
"Anthem must commit to reimbursing consumers for any losses
associated with this breach during the time period between the
breach and the date that the company provides access
to credit and identity theft safeguards," said the letter.
Jepsen also asked Anthem to contact his office by Wednesday
afternoon with details of its plans to "provide adequate
protections" to consumers whose data was exposed in this breach.
The letter was written on behalf of Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois,
Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and
Rhode Island.
Anthem said on Tuesday it is committed to timely notification of
consumers affected by the attack on its database and has been
working with a vendor to prepare to provide credit monitoring and
identity repair services to potentially millions of customers.
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"We have laid out a thoughtful plan with this vendor so that they
can accommodate what we anticipate will be very high demand for
these services. We plan to communicate to members very soon, about
how exactly they can enroll," the company said in an emailed
statement.
Anthem disclosed the massive breach last week, saying that hackers
accessed a database of some 80 million consumers and employees that
contained Social Security numbers and other sensitive data.
On Friday the company warned U.S. customers about an email scam
targeting former and current members.
(Additional reporting by Susan Kelly in CHICAGO; Editing by Andrew
Hay and Kenneth Maxwell)
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