State ends funds for funerals of poor
TOPEKA —Starting Thursday, Kansas will no longer help pay to bury people whose families can't afford funeral expenses.
That has counties, and funeral homes, worried that they will end up with the bill.
The $520,000 program stopped accepting applications May 31, a victim of the more than $1.5 billion cut from the state budget since the 2009 budget year started July 1, 2008.
During the 2009 budget year, the state paid $550 apiece to help cover funeral and burial costs for 308 people in Sedgwick County who had died lacking the money to cover the arrangements.
Statewide, the program helped cover funeral expenses for 1,194 people that same year. For the first seven months of the 2010 budget year — July to January — the program covered 589 people, 170 of whom were in Sedgwick County.
"What happens now when a family truly doesn't have any money?" asked Mack Smith, executive secretary of Kansas Board of Mortuary Arts.
A group of county officials and funeral directors met recently to discuss options.
Among other concerns, the group worried about what would happen when funeral homes pick up bodies only to realize that the family has no money to pay for services.
"Funeral homes may be willing to take on a few charitable cases, but after a few, they will discontinue picking up bodies where family/next of kin cannot be located and they receive no county support. At that point, dead body disposal will become a health issue for counties," said a Kansas Association of Counties memo summarizing the meeting.
Ashley Cozine, president of Broadway Mortuary in Wichita, said his business has taken care of a handful of families who would have previously received help from the state. The cutback hasn't created a problem yet, but families need to know the program no longer exists, he said.
He has seen cases in which families don't want to deal with the funeral, either because it was a family member they didn't know or an estranged parent, but the assistance program helped cover costs.
"Now we don't have that safety net in a sense, if someone says 'I'm walking away from this,' " he said. "Funeral homes are not going to be able to shoulder this financial burden indefinitely."
Counties needed to develop policies for how they would handle unclaimed bodies that had already been delivered to funeral homes, he said.
Unclaimed bodies
Counties are under no obligation to help the poor pay for burial expenses. But under state law, counties are responsible for paying for the burial or cremation of unclaimed bodies.
Sedgwick County had nine unclaimed bodies in 2009 and 18 the year before, said Bob Lamkey, Sedgwick County Public Safety Director.
He and others worry that without money for burial assistance, more low-income families will avoid claiming bodies of distant relatives or acquaintances, leaving the responsibility to the county.
They also worry about what will happen to those who have no family.
Lamkey estimates as many as one-third of the families who had previously received $550 from the state program might have left a body unclaimed if they hadn't received financial assistance.
"We don't have a good sense of what the impact will be, what is the tipping point for a family to say 'we can't afford to do this,' " Lamkey said.
Counties are facing their own budget woes.
Melissa Wangemann, general counsel for the Kansas Association of Counties, said that funerals for the poor aren't the only place where the state has reduced funding and shifted responsibilities to counties.
"It is a problem because our finances are limited," she said.
Counties have few options. The University of Kansas Medical Center Willed Body Program uses donated bodies to train future doctors at the medical school. But the program rarely accepts unclaimed bodies because it has such strict requirements.
"They often say 'Thank you, but no thank you,' " Lamkey said.
Which means that the county would be required to cover the costs to bury or cremate an unclaimed body. In Sedgwick County that costs about $1,700 for a burial and $700 for cremation, he said.
A work in progress
The Association of Counties memo suggested that funeral directors find a way to reduce costs and that counties consider using any abandoned cemeteries they may own.
The $550 payment helped some families scrape together enough money to bury loved ones. Funeral homes often helped by charging only for materials.
The $550 payment "barely covers for out-of-pocket expenses if it even does that," said Pam Scott, executive director of the Kansas Funeral Directors Association.
"People have a right to a dignified burial or disposition.... Funeral homes want to make sure that happens, but they cannot afford to take up the responsibilities of what the state has done in the past," Scott said.
Cozine said Broadway Mortuary will continue discounting services for families who would have previously received the funeral assistance payment.
"We feel we have an obligation to take care of everybody regardless of their financial situation," he said.
He noted that families that accepted the funeral assistance money were required to keep their expenses to less than $2,500. While the state money only covered up to 20 percent of the maximum cost, "at least there was money that we could cover basic costs," he said.
For now, Scott describes the situation as a work in progress. Her hope is that lawmakers will reinstate money for the program next year.
"There are some who truly have no money available or people who truly have no family whatsoever, and those are the ones we are concerned about," she said.
Reach Jeannine Koranda at 785-296-3006 or jkoranda@wichitaeagle.com.
This story was originally published June 27, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "State ends funds for funerals of poor."