A recent Guardian article offers excellent advice to caregivers for individuals with dementia. The author, Cynthia Dearborn, shared her experiences about caring for a father with vascular dementia. Cynthia described how her father’s short-term memory became severely impaired, along with his judgment and reasoning skills. I am having a similar experience with a Transition Plans’
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End of Life Forums: Well Intended, but Sometimes Misleading
By Bill Stalter on
We find the AgingCare website to be a good source information for end of life planning. The website includes a forum for readers to post questions and offer their experiences. However, readers need to be careful when the forum is used to seek legal help on end of life issues. One such topic thread began…
Missouri SB32: A New Audit Direction
By Bill Stalter on
With our next few posts we will dive deeper into SB32, the Missouri preneed legislation intended to provide the State Board a new audit direction and some new enforcement tools. Our first issue will be the change in course on preneed audits.
The bill would amend section 436.470 by adding the following new section:
3. …
Missouri Funeral Legislation: Lowering the Bar
By Bill Stalter on
Posted in Funeral Home Business Practices, Uncategorized
The current shortage of qualified workers has caught up with the death care industry. Funeral home owners are finding it difficult to fill open positions. Salary demands are rising, and industries competing for death care workers can offer perks that funeral homes find difficult to match. While the death care industry has been notorious for…
Funeral Rule Revisions: Last Chance for Comments
By Bill Stalter on
Posted in Compliance, Uncategorized
Most of industry leaders, including the NFDA, seem resigned to the reality that the Funeral Rule will be amended to require the posting of price lists on funeral home websites in some form or fashion. But the FTC extension of the comment deadline from January 3rd to January 17th indicates the Commission does value…
Funeral Rule Readability: What Makes for a Good GPL?
By Bill Stalter on
Posted in Compliance, Uncategorized
The next-to-last section of the Funeral Rule notice (Issues 32-36) deals with what the FTC calls Price List Readability. This seemed to us as a very nebulous phrase, and so we searched “Price List Readability” in the context of the Consumer Funeral Alliance, and lo and behold, the CFA has guidelines for what it…
FTC’s 40 Issues: Confirming Delivery of Price Lists to the Online Shopper
By Bill Stalter on
With Issues No. 10 through 15 of the FTC’s Funeral Rule notice, the agency begins inquiries on how to ensure the online shopper has access to all of the funeral home’s price lists before making any selections. Would it be sufficient to require the funeral home’s website to provide links for downloading the GPL (and…
FTC’s “Forty Issues” and the Funeral Rule Comment Period: Time to Get Serious
By Bill Stalter on
By a posting made November 1, the Federal Trade Commission gave formal notice of its intent to revise the Funeral Rule and opened a 60 day comment period. The notice is quite lengthy and signals that that the FTC wants major revisions to the Funeral Rule that go well beyond whether to require the posting…
Missouri Funeral Trust: Is there anything to be learned from Wisconsin?
By Bill Stalter on
Posted in Uncategorized
When the MFT’s previous preneed exam was making news during the summer of 2015, reorganization plans were being filed for the Wisconsin Master Trust and the California Master Trust. As we reported in “Association Master Trusts: De Facto Trustees”, each reorganization plan sought to eliminate the association’s de facto trustee relationship that had…
Missouri Funeral Trust: Just how much is this costing consumers and funeral homes?
By Bill Stalter on
Posted in Uncategorized
When the MFDEA Preneed Portability video disclosed that expense distributions were being paid from the Missouri Funeral Trust to the association, we thought it was appropriate to revisit prior blog posts about the failures of association master trusts in Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and California. Those state association master trusts were forced to close, to restructure…