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| Ruth Bennett, board president of the non-profit People’s Memorial Association, says the new county fee will cause funeral directors to increase prices by $100 to $300. Photo by Katia Roberts. |
Somewhere between one and two dozen of the people who died unexpectedly in King County in each of the past few years — say, from a fall or a heart attack — were supposed to have the cause of their deaths verified by the King County Medical Examiner.
But, before he could get to them, their bodies were turned to ashes.
That’s a small number compared to the 7,000 cremations and 3,000 or more burials performed each year in the county. But it was enough to worry the county’s Public Health department and its chief medical examiner, Richard Harruff, that, if there had been foul play, any evidence of it was destroyed by cremation.
So, in November, Harruff and officials at the department of Public Health got the King County Council to pass an ordinance creating a new $50 cremation permit. As of Jan. 5, the law requires funeral directors to file a doctor’s death certificate directly with the medical examiner so his office can review the cause of death prior to issuing the permit, which the county promises in 24 hours.
Some Seattle funeral directors are up in arms about the change, saying they had no notice the county was even considering such a law and that it should be repealed: They say it discriminates not only against the poor, who can’t afford costly burials, but Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs and members of other religions that call for cremation.
“It’s just rank discrimination against those religions that require cremation,” says Ruth Bennett, board president of the People’s Memorial Association and Funeral Coop, a Seattle nonprofit that provides low-cost funeral services, including cremations at $650.
“It’s a death tax on the poor,” she says. “If you have a $25,000 funeral [with a burial], you don’t have to pay the $50. But if you have to go to the relatives and scrape up the money for a direct cremation, you have to pay. There’s no justice in that.”
In a Dec. 18 email to Bennett, Leesa Manion, chief of staff for the King County prosecutor, disagrees on the religious issue, saying the need to obtain a permit “does not appear to present a risk of affecting the actual practice of cremation.”
Higher costs, however, will affect poor families, Bennett says, who can expect funeral directors to pass on more than just the $50 fee. To cover the time they spend filling out the two pages of permit forms, most are likely to tack on a total of $100 to $300.
It’s all for nothing, say Bennett and Jewell Steffensen, executive secretary of the Tacoma-based Washington State Funeral Directors Association, since funeral directors were already required to report suspicious deaths. In King County, they also had to get an authorization from the medical examiner before they could pick up a body.
“It’s ridiculous when you already have steps to ensure that a person died by natural causes or, if it’s a trauma case, it’s been investigated by the police,” Steffensen says. “We think this is just a way of creating revenue” for the ME’s office.
Not so, says Gareth Johnson, prevention division manager for Public Health - Seattle & King County. The $50 fee, which will generate about $350,000 a year, was carefully calculated, he says, to cover just the costs of services. That includes paying for a new full-time clerk, a full-time death investigator, and a half-time pathologist in the ME’s office solely to process the cremation permits.
The pathologist will assess the causes listed on the doctor’s death certificate, send the field investigator out to the site of the death if needed, and can order an exam or autopsy before the body is disposed of.
The funeral director will still have to file the death certificate with one of Public Health’s vital statistics offices, then apply for the cremation permit at the ME’s office. The certificates always made their way to the ME in a day or two, Johnson says — but, in one case about a year ago, a statistics staffer missed a red flag on a death certificate that the ME didn’t get to see in time.
“We had a death that was accurately recorded by the physician,” Johnson says, “and someone who was processing the paperwork for the death certificate, because they’re not medical professionals, didn’t understand that subdural hematoma is an indication of an injury to the skull — it’s essentially blunt-force trauma.”
“As a result,” he says, “the permit for the disposition of the body was issued.”
“Nobody likes airing dirty laundry,” Johnson says. But, “In this case, errors are not acceptable, innocent or not.”
John Eric Rolstad, executive director of People’s Memorial, agrees, “but we don’t see where faxing two pieces of paper over and paying $50 is going to do any more to uncover cases of foul play,” he says.
What’s more, “it’s extremely regressive,” he says. “You’re putting a tax on the only option available to low-income people.”
Johnson disputes that it is only poor families who choose cremation. Regardless, he says, “Even the poor have a right to an authoritative determination as to whether someone caused their death.” |
