Maria, the mother of Mireya Masó, is 89 years old and for the last four months she has been declared dead without anyone knowing because, she says, of the alleged mistake of identification by a policeman, who confused her with another a woman with the same name and almost the same age who died in March in Barcelona. The family found out about the mistake after the pharmacy did not give him the prescribed medicines. She was listed as dead. Mireya has managed to resuscitate her mother administratively, but she denounces the bureaucratic journey and the lack of empathy she has had to solve someone else’s mistake.
“I’m exhausted”, repeats Mireya Masó in conversation with La Vanguardia. This Barcelona native has spent practically the last month going from window to window to find out why her 89-year-old mother had been presumed dead, and what she could do to correct the mistake. The first indication that something was wrong was at the pharmacy. They told one of Maria’s two carers, who is dependent, that they could not give her the prescribed medicines because “she was dead”. Mireya did not find out about that episode until June, when one of the caregivers called her to ask why she had been terminated from Social Security. Mireya Masó’s journey began when she discovered that the Administration considered her mother dead.
“On all institutional websites you find chaos. You have to be an expert to move there”, denounces Masó. After countless calls, he began the pilgrimage after discovering that his mother had not received her pension since April. “At Social Security they gave me an appointment for a month from now, so I showed up without an appointment,” explains this Barcelona native. “I asked for an appointment everywhere because I realized that my mother had fallen out of the system,” he continues. The INE, the Social Security or the Civil Registry have been some of the places he has gone to knock on the door to ask for help and explanations several times, but without luck.
After many inquiries and returning to the Civil Registry “almost like a lawyer”, she asked to testify before a judge, she explains. And that’s when he started to figure out what had happened. In mid-March a woman with the same name and identical surnames as her mother and very similar age had died at home. But the cop “I guess he identified her with the first ID that appeared with that name, which was my mother’s,” he says. Mossos sources consulted assure, however, that although this problem could be generated and a person who is not found dead due to the fact of searching in police data, “our data is not fed or dumped to other Administration databases”. They consider that “the error comes from the other side”.
“Everyone shirks the responsibility”, laments this Barcelona resident, who also denounces the “monster that has become of inoperative officials”. He denounces the little help he has received in this almost entire month of management and that nowhere have they given him the slightest apology. He assures that he has had to experience “surreal” situations and criticizes the fact that there is no compensation for the time he has invested in solving someone else’s mistake, in addition to “moral damage”.
On Friday, just the day he reported the case to El món on RAC1, he received the response by letter to the appeal submitted to the Social Security confirming that the mother was discharged again. It was possible to resolve the issue of the pension and the discharge of the female workers. He also has the right to vote again and it remains to be seen what will happen to his ID.
Maria, Mireya’s mother, has gone through this process unrelated to everything because of her state of health, as she has been hospitalized for the last week. As for how he would have reacted if this had happened a decade ago, with his mother in better health, he has no doubts: “I would have organized a commotion”.
