Victoria Haneman’s recent article, Prepaid Death, is a call for change in the way that people shop for and ultimately purchase burial and funeral services as well as a plea for policy reforms that would encourage consumers to make these important decisions pre-need rather than at the time of death. At death, the time of need, family members and others involved in the funeral services selection are grieving, vulnerable, and willing to pay exorbitant amounts for things that the decedent might not even have wanted. As Haneman points out: “The pre-need consumer is cost-sensitive and far less likely to make decisions that are time-pressured or driven by guilt. Although decisions may be unfamiliar, there is time to research and familiarize oneself with options and providers — including new and innovative death care technologies that may not be on the menu of choices offered at one’s local funeral home.” She also points out that when consumers have more time to explore their options, low- and middle-income consumers benefit because of increased opportunities to access financing options.
The solution that Haneman suggests is leveraging Internal Revenue Code section 125 and flexible spending account principles. The current Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) program allows eligible employees to make voluntary pre-tax contributions for certain qualified benefits that do not currently include death care. One option would be to allow consumers to create a dedicated Death Care Flexible Spending Account funded with pre-tax earnings contributed to this earmarked account. A second option would be to continue using FSAs in their current form but add death care expenses to the list of reimbursable “qualified expenses.”
This proposal constitutes an eminently reasonable approach not only to funding death care expenses but also to nudging consumers toward pre-need shopping. For this proposal alone the article stands as an important contribution in the death care literature. In addition, however, as Haneman takes the reader through her analysis, she identifies three important economies that center around death. First, there is the corporate economy, driven by an industry that is only slowly coming to change and whose practices remain for the most part mired in the past. Second, there are household and family economies that intersect with – and generally suffer from – conventional corporate practices. Lastly, there is a cultural economy that informs and influences consumer decision-making by setting certain standards for burial and linking them to prestige, prosperity, and even sentiment for the deceased. These three economies –networks of exchange, wealth, and resources– are all relevant areas of inquiry about death care that merit pause for further discussion.
In terms of the corporate economy, Haneman tells us not only that “[d]eath has become a large, lucrative, bureaucratic, corporate business over the span of five generations” but also that “[t]he business of death is managed by a death care industrial complex with revenues projected to exceed $68 billion by 2023.” And, for the most part, it is an industry with highly entrenched practices that are both outdated and expensive. Putting a face to the industry, Haneman also notes that “[t]he average funeral director or mortician in the United States is a white (77.6%), middle-aged (51.8 years old) man (69.1%) offering products and services in line with what has been offered for at least half a century.” Moreover, the prepaid funeral industry, as a subset of this corporate economy, has long engendered companies running fraudulent schemes and financial elder abuse. Change is afoot (new burial practices, hip morticians, and cutting edge advertising), Haneman tells us, but it has come late to an industry that has been highly corporatized and highly resistant to innovation.
A related and intersecting economy — or set of multiple economies — is that of household and personal finance. In this realm of personal economy, the concern that drives Haneman, and one that deserves greater attention, is the concept of funeral poverty. Haneman points out that funeral costs are the “the third largest category of expense incurred over a lifetime.” To contextualize the outsized cost of funerals, Haneman reminds the reader that “[i]t is estimated that 40% of Americans would have great difficulty contending with an unexpected $400 expense and fewer than 40% could afford to pay the surprise $1,000 expense out of savings.” Death, in this way, can be both “emotionally devastating” and “economically shattering.” Stepping into the breach, predictably, there are now funeral lenders who target such “subprime” borrowers and “offer financing for funerary expenses with interest rates advertised as high as 35.99%.” Thinking about the ways in which low-income families can more easily bear the unavoidable expense of burying a family member or other loved one is an important component of Haneman’s proposal for pre-need planning, and the ability of every family and household to afford a certain standard of burial service bears further thought and policy intervention. These kinds of interventions would recognize, as Haneman does, that “[a] failure to provide for oneself or one’s dependents is stigmatized and often accompanied by feelings of shame, inadequacy, and inferiority …. [and] [b]ereavement compounds this sense of failure.”
The feelings of shame that come with the inability to afford a “proper” funeral take us directly into the third relevant economy, which is the cultural economy, or a network and exchange of norms and expectations around death. It is not surprising that “lower-income families spend far more than higher-income families, relative to total expenditures [on funeral costs],” but what might be surprising is that “in 2014, the top 1% spent less on funerals than everyone else—in share of total expenditures, but also … in absolute dollars. Conversely, the poor spent a ‘26% greater share of total expenditures than the national average.’” These data points, Haneman suggests, affirm certain historical and cultural norms, in particular the Anglo-American idea that spending on funerals was a way for lower-income families in Edwardian and Victorian England to display status (The Great British Bake Off fans might remember the funeral biscuits many seasons back). What the data points certainly underscore is that there are, as Haneman observes, “many layers undergirding the need for showy, costly, public ceremonies.” These include: “spending to satisfy community expectations, honor cultural traditions, or avoid peer judgment; conspicuous consumption designed to signal the prestige of the family or decedent; spending at a level deemed respectable to honor the deceased or to avoid peer judgment; or a fear of what others in the community will think if spending is limited.” Low-income families will not necessarily buy the most economical funeral services, even if they shop pre-need, and therefore changing the future of funeral planning cannot happen without recognizing and understanding the multiplicity of cultural imperatives that drive consumption.
Asking readers to think about all these interlocking economies, Haneman brings to the fore some of the most interesting and salient aspects of death care and the funeral industry. And in so doing, she highlights perennial questions about corporate power, household budgeting, and the tie between law and culture.
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