The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to eliminate a $400 fee that had been charged by the medical examiner for the transportation and storage of bodies, saying grieving families should be spared that financial burden as an act of compassion.
Under state law, bodies are typically transported to the medical examiner in the event of sudden, violent or unusual deaths.
The county medical examiner also assesses unattended deaths and those in which the deceased hadn’t been seen by a doctor or a registered nurse who is part of a hospice team in the 20 days leading up to death.
The unanimous vote comes less than a year after the county launched a pilot program to waive the fee across the board for county residents. Families had been previously charged the fee for transporting a body from the location where someone died to the medical examiner facility.
“This fee was often unexpected and our county residents were responsible to pay for it,” Supervisor Hilda L. Solis said Tuesday before the vote. “We must ensure that the county does what it can to practice compassion and equity by continuing to ease the financial burden for residents who are seeking to lay their loved ones to rest.”
L.A. County officials said an analysis of county data showed the fee had disproportionately affected poorer residents. Dr. Odey C. Ukpo, the county chief medical examiner, previously told the county board that only half of families were able to pay the fee in recent years. Before the pilot program began, county officials said the medical examiner had waived the fee on a case-by-case basis when families said they couldn’t pay.
“We shouldn’t put the burden of reaching out and asking for help on the person whose family member has just passed away,” Supervisor Janice Hahn said when the pilot program was approved last year.
Hahn on Tuesday credited Ukpo with coming up with the idea of eliminating the county fee. She said that doing so would make L.A. County the only jurisdiction in the state to end such a charge.
Waiving the fee for roughly half a year was estimated to cost the county $360,000 and had aided hundreds of families, according to a September report from the medical examiner. A spokesperson for the medical examiner estimated that eliminating the fee entirely would reduce revenue by roughly $1 million annually.
Ukpo told the county board that his department had found roughly $500,000 in annual savings by avoiding transportation from hospitals to his facilities in cases where it was unneeded. L.A. County Chief Executive Officer Fesia Davenport added that she and her staff had already identified funds to cover the loss of revenue.
