Last year was the deadliest in U.S. history. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), deaths topped 3 million for the first time due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Many Americans had to bury a loved one, while already facing financial strain due to COVID-19. With average funeral and burial costs exceeding $9,000, the issue of funeral poverty has been exacerbated, according to Professor Victoria Haneman at Creighton University School of Law.
She is advocating for changes in the death services industry to help reduce funeral poverty and make families more empowered to plan for and manage end-of-life decisions.
Funerals are the third-largest expense for families, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and research from the Federal Reserve indicates 40% of Americans would have great difficulty covering an unexpected $400 expense. When loved ones die, grief-stricken families have to make quick, and often costly, decisions.
Fortunately, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and members of U.S. Congress recently announced low-income families will soon be able to apply for funeral reimbursement of up to $7,000, as part of a COVID-19 relief bill passed in December.
“Consumers are forced to deal with an extraordinarily expensive expenditure at a time when they are likely to be cognitively impaired,” said Haneman, Creighton’s Frank J. Kellegher Professor of Trusts & Estates. “During this time of bereavement, the relatively uninformed consumer generally leans upon the advice of industry professionals with a profit-seeking objective.”
Haneman, whose research will soon be published in the University of Richmond Law Review, believes unconsidered expenses perpetuate inequality and contribute to intergenerational cycles of poverty.
Through her ongoing research on the death care services project, which includes funeral poverty, green burial and the intersection of both with the Internal Revenue Code, she hopes to demonstrate to her students the ways in which traditional structures can be considered through a creative lens, and the role that lawyers can play in being agents of change. She said changes are needed to heighten consumer death literacy, bring awareness to spending during times of grief and ease access to information and alternative choices.
“It is imperative that options be made available to transition human remains in a way that does not exacerbate cycles of poverty and allows for the living to preserve dignity. This need calls for important changes to existing legal structures, including modernization of consumer protection regulation, change to laws regulating the death service industry and recharacterization of expenses for tax purposes,” Haneman said.