Government Zombies See Dead People

Originally posted at American Thinker.

The Zombie Apocalypse may be here, because it appears that dead people are showing up and trying to pass themselves off as living.

Take for instance the mother of deceased 15-year-old Jasmine. Recently, Laurie Villarreal, Jasmine Martinez’s bereaved mom, paid a visit to the Social Security Administration, which everyone knows is run by an infallible bureaucracy. After the IRS rejected Villarreal’s 2012 tax return and in an effort to illegally collect a $5,000 tax refund, the woman tried to pull a fast one by insisting that her dependent daughter Jasmine was still very much alive.

Government workers weren’t going to be fooled by that story, and despite being provided Jasmine’s “Fingerprints. Social Security, birth certificate, school records, everything,” the not-to-be-fooled geniuses at the SSA weren’t having any of it.

After all, if the government says you’re dead, like it or not, dead you are.

Desperate to collect her $5,000, Jasmine’s mom dragged her daughter’s carcass all over creation trying to pass her off as living. Speaking from beyond the grave, Jasmine claimed, “I had to get out of school. I had to bring my ID, I had to bring everything, and they still didn’t believe [me].”

Laurie jumped through all the hoops, but was still told additional paperwork was missing. After submitting a fresh batch of forms, Villarreal heard nothing back.

Thankfully, as it turns out, Jasmine really is alive!

A living, breathing teenage girl standing in front of bureaucrats and still being called dead doesn’t bode well for patients with a pulse trying to avoid being prematurely bundled up in a shroud and delivered to the hospital ice box after government-run ObamaCare fully kicks in. Why? Because it took a full year for Social Security to concede that there was a Jasmine who was dead in California, but she wasn’t the same Jasmine who’d been trying for 12 months to prove she was alive in Illinois.

The excuse from the Social Security Administration was that someone who matched Jasmine’s profile caused the never-ever-confused civil service workers to get mixed up.

Records show that every month, while they’re still alive and kicking, the Social Security Administration lists about 1,000 Americans as dead. What will happen when John (the second most popular first name) Smiths (the most common last name) start kicking the bucket all over the place? That remains to be seen.

One year later, Social Security reports that the Martinez mistake is corrected, and at least for now, as far as official records go, Jasmine has been relocated from the dead column back into the living column. Unfortunately, to date, the IRS still hasn’t sent Laurie that belated tax refund check she’s been waiting for.

Jasmine’s mom had this to say: “You’re dealing with more than just a little mistake. You’re dealing with peoples’ lives.” Uh, yeah! And pretty soon bureaucrats will be dealing with all our lives via government-involved health care.

Before long, when 300 million life-and-death decisions are being made by Magnanimous Central, things could get a little hectic in the alive-or-dead department, which will cause complications for people who have not yet assumed room temperature. But then again, the IRS will be running the entire show, and according to President Obama, that branch of the government is very efficient.

Nonetheless, Laurie Villarreal, mother of the formerly dead Jasmine, said “It’s been very stressful both emotionally [and] financially.” Is she saying that having your child mistakenly declared dead by people who then made the mistake of refusing to believe she’s alive is stressful?

Another woman, 78-year-old Jo Anne Metternich, who, sorry to say, is much closer to being dead than Jasmine, had a similar experience when she recently tried to open a joint bank account with her daughter. That’s when Jo Anne was informed that she too was dead.

According to Metternich, the bank employee “ran a credit report, and she looked at me and she said, ‘This says you’re deceased,’ and I just sat there in shock.”

Evidently the woman never saw the “I see dead people” movie The Sixth Sense, wherein after hanging around for months, Bruce Willis finally realizes he’s one of the dead people.

Metternich complained, “What angers me so much is that these things happen and then it’s up to me to get it corrected.”

An Inspector General’s report says dead-when-living mistakes are a result of “inaccurate death reports or inaccurate data input” which, again, with the dawning of ObamaCare, brings little solace to those about to become casualties of the healthcare system.

In the future, what if a person is bleeding from a major artery, seeks help, and then pops up on the government database as “Deceased?” Do they have to wait until the régime irons out those “glitches” too before anyone can apply pressure to the wound?

In other words, if this happens in the healthcare arena, before government workers can get the bleeding to stop on a patient listed as dead, will the injured-but-not-dead party have to find a way to prove that the source of the blood geyser is actually a beating heart?

In young Jasmine’s case, it took a year to prove she was alive. After the fact, a Social Security spokeswoman commiserated with the Martinez/Villarreal family’s dilemma, saying, “Unfortunately, these things happen… but some cases are more complicated than others.”

With the dawn of ObamaCare upon us, it’s guaranteed that many more living people are sure to be entered into the database as deceased. That’s why things are about to become very difficult for millions ofAmericans who’ll have to deal with government zombies insisting that the person standing right in front of them is dead.