Indigent funerals and funeral home owner benevolence

 

I live in America which is a representative democracy with the freedom for individuals to attain through education, hard work, creative enterprise, investment, and sometimes just plain luck the ability to gain and collect more resources than others.  To that same end, the country offers no guarantee that your work and life will end with the resources available to even pay for your own funeral expense.

 

And while there are some federal programs for those who find themselves unfortunate enough to need financial assistance from the government, there is no federal program that will pay funeral or cremation expenses for those unfortunate enough to not have the resources to do so at the time of their death.

 

In the United States’ representative democracy some powers, such as printing money or declaring war, are vested in the federal government while some powers, such as providing police protection and the zoning of land, are vested with the individual states who can pass those powers down to the county and city levels.

 

It is at the county level where most decisions on how a person without funds will be taken care of when they die.

 

Over the years most local funeral homes have been incredibly benevolent in helping counties take care of these people at a very reasonable cost.  Funeral directors are, in my opinion, mostly benevolent and caring people and they realize that some good  people have had unfortunate circumstances where life, and finances, just didn’t go their way.  In other circumstances, and this happened to me, funeral directors had taken care of generations of families before one of their members needed assistance with funeral costs.  Possibly, as a show of goodwill to the parts of the family that he or she had served profitably over the years, the funeral home owner was willing to do a funeral for that family at a loss.

 

That was, however, in a day and age where traditional casketed funerals were the norm and profits seemed easier to come by.  As funeral service has moved into today’s world of declining revenues per case and inflationary business costs, my guess is that it is tougher and tougher for funeral home owners to be as benevolent in the past.  In addition, especially with the epidemic of opioid deaths among young people, it appears that there may be more and more of what the public calls “indigent” cases.

 

I recently came across this article and news story from Watertown, New York, where funeral directors in that area are requesting Jefferson County to provide a raise to the $1,900 that they provide to funeral homes for this service.  One funeral director told the county that his funeral home’s overhead business costs to provide this service is about $5,000 which he figures results in a $3,100 service loss or donation on each of these services.

 

The article also states “According to the county, there were 108 indigent burials in 2020. In 2022, there were 137. That’s a more than 25 percent increase in two years.”  And, at a service donation of about $3,100 per service that is the equivilent to the county funeral home’s contributing about $425,000 annually for the less fortunate of Jefferson County.

 

A subsequent article and video that you can see here shows that at least one county official seemed to get the funeral directors’ message. . . . .Legislator Corey Grant made this comment, “What needs to be done is that we need to help them (funeral directors) survive, whether it be a little more support or from the county as far as funds, so they are not dipping into their pockets.  We definitely need to be taking care of our people in the county.”

 

Funeral Director Daily take:  While this would be for others to decide, I thought of myself as one of those benevolent funeral home owners.  Our funeral home, for the most part, did financially well and I always would visit with my county commissioners about keeping property taxes down.

 

It was because of that position on property taxes that I didn’t want to by hypocritical and ask for big funding increases when the money flowed my way (county funeral funds) at the same time I was on the commissioners about holding spending down to keep my property taxes down.

 

For this article I found it difficult to find any statistics that might give way to the trends of “government subsidized” funeral services in the USA.  That’s probably the reality and function of having those subsidies come from local governments rather than a general federal program.  My guess, however, is like Jefferson County, New York, the numbers are increasing in this category in most locales across the country.

 

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