What they need help with
Nine areas. Most families arrive worried about one of them and discover four. Tick what is happening and we will point at the areas that answer it — nothing disappears.
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Every licensed setting in the state, from the state's own register. A move is one option on this list, not the point of it — staying put is a row here too.
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Nursing care at home and help with daily life are two different things with two different payers, and almost every family confuses them once. This is the difference, and what each costs you.
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Meals, housekeeping, laundry, company. The unglamorous half of staying at home, and the half that usually slips first.
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Alert buttons, fall detection, sensors, cameras, pill dispensers. Nobody licenses this and nobody publishes a trustworthy ranking, so we will not pretend to.
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Doctors, pharmacy, therapy, and the specialists nobody tells you exist — a geriatrician is not the same as a family doctor who has older patients.
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The jobs a parent quietly stopped doing. Usually the cheapest thing on this whole list and the one that buys the most time at home.
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Volunteer driver programs and paratransit are free or nearly free in most counties, and almost nobody knows they exist.
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The part families put off and then need at two days' notice. Benefit screening is free and national; so is your state's insurance counseling.
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You do not have to be the only person working on this. Three of these are free and independent of the industry, which is more than can be said for most of the advice online.
Why the free option is always listed first
Where a subsidized or public service exists — the meal program, the volunteer driver service, the ombudsman, the free public agency for her county — it appears above the paid alternative, every time. That is not generosity; it is the same rule as the rest of this site. Money never changes what we recommend, and the day any of this earns us something, the page that earns it will say so on the page.