In Colorado, residents are all equal in life. In death, well, that’s another matter.
For the past several years, state officials have struggled with how best to handle the arcane system that deals with life’s only inevitability: death. Colorado, like some Western states, still uses an out-of-date county coroner system that begs to be changed, and probably won’t any time soon.
Almost every year, state lawmakers are confronted with possible changes to the system of declaring someone legally dead, determining whether the death was natural, and what caused it. This year is no different. The problem is, legislators repeatedly try to fix a system that is fundamentally broken.
The current system of elected county coroners reaches back to Colorado’s mid-1800s beginnings, before even the advent of electrical power, let alone powerful microscopes. Science has since then invented and thoroughly transformed the practice of forensic medical examination, determining in great detail why someone died. Unfortunately, state law has hardly kept up.
County coroner offices are responsible for ruling on the cause of death. And in cases of insurance benefits and criminal investigations, accurate and timely results are imperative. That rubs against the fact that to be a coroner in almost any of Colorado’s 64 counties, a candidate for these elected offices need only be 18 years old or older, have a high school diploma or GED, and take a training program. The system hardly says, “Quincy, M.E.”
For generations, the system has worked because most deaths are fairly clear cut and hardly unusual. In counties like Denver and Arapahoe, coroners either are or have access to trained forensic pathologists, able to reveal a great deal about the cause of death.
Rather than “tweak” a system that puts critical and specialized work in the hands of a politician, it’s time to stop electing this important and skilled position. Either the state or the counties should appoint qualified people to this important work.
That doesn’t mean Colorado should hire 64 trained medical examiners. In rural parts of the state, regional pathology centers are all that should be required.
And in large metropolitan areas such as Aurora, the state’s health department could easily coordinate larger, regional centers for dealing with anything but the most mundane and uneventful deaths. The majority of people in Colorado simply die ordinary, unremarkable deaths. Local coroners offices in these cases could perform the bureaucratic duties that the state requires at the end of everyone’s life.
But it’s past time to recognize that science has moved far beyond what it was almost 150 years ago, and the state’s government needs to catch up.