The American Way of Death Revisited - Jessica Mitford [141]
Today, the need to shelter assets for Medicaid eligibility is another reason people pay for their funeral in advance. There are now no federal guidelines limiting the amount that may be set aside for a funeral. Many states—exercising their options as administrators of Medicaid—have set their own limits. Connecticut has set its limit at $4,800; California, $10,000. In New Jersey, the sky’s the limit, and it need hardly be said that this is well known by the vendors of funeral services in that state. A hidden-camera “20/20” investigation captured an undertaker offering to accept $20,000 for a future funeral, assuring the client that any “extra” would be returned to the family.
Funeral directors have a strong motivation to sell ahead of time. Each funeral they have under wraps is one less that will go to a competitor. “A well-run, aggressive preneed program will increase a firm’s market share,” writes Thomas Barnard in the NFDA journal The Director. Given a nationwide proliferation of funeral homes, market share is a driving concern. According to the Funeral and Memorial Societies of America, “If people died Monday through Friday with two weeks off for the mortician’s vacation, the death rate in the U.S. could support 9,288 full-time funeral homes. Yet there are more than 22,000 mortuaries in this country. Many get only one or two funerals a week.”
Do people spend more or less when they plan ahead? Prearranged funerals tend to be much less expensive than those arranged by sorrowing survivors, according to some reports. Howard C. Raether took note of this fact long ago at a National Funeral Directors Association convention. He was discussing an analysis of funeral sales: “If it were possible to tabulate all the prearranged funeral services on record, how do you suppose the average of all of them would compare with the average adult figure shown here?” (Average adult figure means average price of an adult’s funeral.) “Are you ready, willing and able to become part of a program that is going to lower the quality of the average funeral service selected to the point where you will find it difficult if not impossible to stay in business rendering the service you now give?” He added, “It is good for those who survive to have the right and duty to make the funeral arrangements. Making such arrangements, having such responsibilities, is essential. It is part of the grief syndrome, part of the therapy of mourning. It is a positive hook upon which the hat of funeral service is hung. Why should we tear it down by saying the funeral is for the deceased, therefore he or she should make the arrangements?… If funeral directors insist on soliciting pre-need funerals, they are in fact prearranging the funeral of their profession.”
More recent developments in the techniques of pre-need selling, a matter of prime importance to the trade, have proved Mr. Raether’s dour prediction wrong. According to Ron Hast, that knowledgeable sage of the industry, people tend to be more gullible when seated comfortably in their own living rooms. “Pictures of beautifully displayed caskets are far less intimidating when shown to the prospect while sitting on the sofa than when they are presented in a mortuary’s casket selection room.… They start to think of them as quality furniture. They will spend more, not less, on a prearranged casket.”
In any case, those gloom and doom predictions on the impact of prearrangement have long since fallen on deaf ears. By 1995 no less than $20 billion was, according to Consumers Digest senior editor John Wasik, tied down in prepaid funeral and cemetery plans. That estimate, outsized as it seems, is surely on the low side, because SCI alone today lays claim to holdings of $3.2 billion in prepayments.
Today, it is the corporate chains that are doing some of the most aggressive selling. What do they know that the public does not? And what can be wrong with paying in advance to guarantee prices?
Inflation