For the backstory on Montana's war on affordable funerals, see:

Montana Funeral Directors Try to Shut Down Competition

Montana: The Divine Right of Undertakers II

The state's funeral industry and its regulatory handmaidens just won't quit. The latest? Proposed revisions to the Board of Funeral Service's regulations that would sneakily put low-cost, direct-to-consumer crematories out of business. How? By making it illegal for a crematory operator to do the most basic, necessary tasks on his own :

• Crematory operators would be barred from removing pacemakers (which state law requires, and which could blow up if not removed before cremation) unless they did so in a fully-equipped embalming room in a full-service mortuary. This would be like offering a Jiffy Lube from changing a car's oil unless it did so in a full-service car dealership with diagnostic computers and emissions-control equipment.
  
  Since no full-service mortuary is going to let a crematory competitor use its embalming room, or would charge a fee, or since the embalming room would be physically distant, this effectively prohibits cremation businesses from operating independent of a competitor.
  
  
• Crematory operators could not even wash, dress, or comb the hair of a deceased person outside the walls of a full-embalming suite at a full-service mortuary. 
  
  
• Anyone selling any kind of funeral—full-service, basic, or cremation-only—could only discuss it with the customer within the physical building of a full service funeral home or branch, unless otherwise requested by the customer. No, it doesn't make much sense to us either, but it appears to be another way to make business impossible for honest, reasonably priced businesses like Central Montana Crematorium. 

Here's our letter to the state board, which we've also sent to the Governor's office. 

Bureau of Consumer Protection
Business Center
Federal Trade Commission

The Funeral Rule gives people making funeral arrangements some important rights. And it establishes some basic requirements for funeral homes. If you sell funeral goods and services, you’ll want to know how to comply.

SEE VIDEO 3:17

Green Burial in New York State

You are invited to attend our Annual Meeting of the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Long Island/New York City on Saturday, April 13, 2013, at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Shelter Rock,
48 Shelter Rock Road, Manhasset, New York. The meeting is free. Refreshments are served after the meeting.

Serious Funeral Planning Conversations
Keynote address at FCA-VT Annual Meeting/Conference
Saturday, May 4th, 1:00 PM, Norwich Congregational Church, Norwich, VT 

We plan our finances, our families, our retirement, just about everything
except our funerals. Without end-of-life planning, life’s other plans can come
undone.

Just as talking about sex won’t make you pregnant, talking about funerals
won’t make you dead – and your family will benefit from the conversation.
Gail Rubin, author of the award-winning book A Good Goodbye: Funeral
Planning for Those Who Don't Plan to Die, uses gentle humor to convey the
vital information about funeral arrangements that most people don’t learn
about until faced with a death in the family.

Ms. Rubin will speak about funeral planning issues, illustrating her points with clips from comedy films and television programs. Films include Death at a Funeral, Undertaking Betty, The Big Lebowski, The Six Wives of Henry LeFay, and the “Chuckles Bites The Dust” episode from the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Come on out to laugh and learn!