A Shandong Province mortuary required the relatives of the dead to pay high fees for unauthorized services such as staff preventing their deceased family members from being gnawed on by rodents, media revealed on Tuesday.
The Jinan-based institution charged fees as high as 900 yuan ($141) per hour.
"Most hospital-affiliated mortuaries in the city are run by private contractors, which has resulted in many complaints," an official at the Jinan price bureau, the department that regulates the city's commodity and service prices, told the Shandong-based news website dzwww.com.
Among the previous complaints, a mortuary had charged a family nearly 7,000 yuan for its services.
The city's mortuaries have been prone to demanding a variety of unauthorized fees in addition to the mouse-biting surcharge and some funeral products are promoted in order to maximize profits, according to the dzwww.com report.
In order to regulate fee collection, protect the interests of citizens and build a satisfying funeral service industry, several Jinan authorities issued a notice this May in which they forbid mortuaries owned by medical institutions from being subcontracted or rented out. Those which have been subcontracted or rented out must be dealt with before July 1.
An official from the Jinan price bureau told the Global Times Tuesday that all hospitals will start to run their mortuaries again and will publish a list of chargeable services.
"Currently, rectification measures in municipal hospitals have almost been finished. We will make a special inspection of other provincial hospitals and medical institutions in Jinan. Medical institutions will be punished if rectifications aren't finished on schedule," an official added.
This incident triggered public debate.
Some believe that the traditional culture demands that families pay utmost respect to their deceased, requiring extravagant funeral arrangements while others think that reasonably-priced funerals are also acceptable.
