'Dead' Guy Collecting Social Security Turns Out To Have Been Alive The Whole time
Worst M. Night Shyamalan twist ever.
Reports of Leonard “Ned” Johnson’s death were greatly exaggerated.
Last month, the 82-year-old Seattle resident’s wife got a letter in the mail from the bank, expressing their “sincerest condolences” for her non-existent loss and informing her that $5,201 had been seized from their bank account, because “We received a request from Social Security Administration to return benefits paid to LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account after their passing.”
Soon enough, his Medicare insurance was canceled, his credit score was reduced to “deceased, do not issue credit,” and he was forced to spend the next three weeks desperately trying to convince the Social Security Administration that he was not a zombie, but, in fact, a living, breathing, non-brain-eating person.
Johnson called the bank to get things straightened out, but they said there was nothing they could do, because on February 18 they received a notice from the Social Security Administration that he had died back in November.
You know what else happened on February 18? Elon Musk tweeting that “According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE! Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”
As we all know by now, Musk actually just didn’t know how to read the data correctly and was likely looking at a flaw in the system that the SSA has known about for years — related to people who simply don’t have a specific death date recorded — but has not fixed because it would cost $9 million to do so and they determined that it would be a waste of money given that they’re not actually collecting Social Security checks.
Alas, that information failed to dissuade him from his belief that legions of the undead are out there collecting Social Security, somehow. He’s obsessed with the idea and absolutely convinced — or pretending to be — that the SSA is losing $700 billion a year due to “waste, fraud and abuse.”
How he arrived at that particular number is unclear. In reality, an inspector general report last year estimated that the SSA made about $72 billion in improper payouts from 2015-2022. This was less than 1 percent of benefits paid during that time, and by 2023 all but $23 billion had been recouped. It had far less to do with fraud than with overpayments (underpayments are also quite common) based on beneficiary self reporting.
Indeed, just last week it was revealed that there are six DOGE workers focused exclusively on proving this point and finding all of the dead people in order to cut them off of the Social Security checks they are not getting — or in Mr. Johnson’s case, finding people who are alive and cutting them off anyway. The SSA issued a press release this weekend to explain, again, that Musk’s folly is not actually a thing.
After finding out about his own untimely demise, Ned Johnson spent the next three weeks desperately calling SSA before finally getting an appointment — and then got a call back pushing that appointment from March 13 to March 24.
But he was not going to wait that long. Johnson decided to go down to the Social Security building in person and also in the daytime so that they could see how exposure to the sun did not cause him to disintegrate into a pile of ash.
Via Seattle Times:
It was like a Depression-era scene, he said, with a queue 50-deep jockeying for the attentions of two tellers. The employees were kind but beleaguered.
“They are so understaffed down there,” he said. “They think the office is about to be closed down, and they don’t know where they’re going to go. It feels like the agency’s being gutted.”
After waiting for four hours, Johnson admits he jumped the line: “I saw an opening and I kind of rushed up and told them I was listed as dead. That seemed to get their attention.”
Once in front of a human, Johnson said he was able to quickly prove he was alive, using his passport and his gift of gab. They pledged to fix his predicament, and on Thursday this past week, the bank called to say it had returned the deducted deposits to his account. As of Friday morning he hadn’t received February or March’s benefits payments.
Johnson admits that he was lucky in that he was not living solely off of Social Security payments, but couldn’t help thinking about those who were.
The Trump administration is hoping to cut 7,000 employees from the SSA, which will make things even more difficult for people who get accidentally declared dead for no reason. It will also, almost definitely, lead to a lot more errors in the system that could result in improper payments and all of the other things Musk and Trump are so sure are happening right now. Hell, it could end up costing us a hell of a lot more than paying those people to keep the SSA running properly would cost.
Musk has also bragged that his DOGE staffers are working 120 hours a week (though how much of that time is spent twirling around their offices for Instagram likes is not known), giving them almost no time for sleep — which is also likely to lead to even more mistakes being made.
It’s almost as if “move fast, break things,” is not actually a good way to manage the Federal Government and the benefits people are relying on to survive.
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Absolute banger image to hed (Ned) the story, Robyn.
I absolutely do not believe that Mr. Johnson is the only person this has happened to in the last 6 weeks or so; he's merely the only one who's story has been picked up by the media