How we write Who Pays for Mom

Who publishes this site

Who Pays for Mom is published by OwnersFirm, a company that builds reference desks for families in the St. Louis metro. This desk is written for one reader at one moment: the sibling, usually a daughter, who does most of the work of caring for a parent and pays for much of it, while the rest of the family argues about money and about who does what. There is no named author, because there is no clinician, lawyer or accountant on this site, and a byline would suggest otherwise.

How an entry gets written

Every entry starts from one question a person actually types, such as how to split the cost between siblings, or what a power of attorney entitles an agent to. The answer is built from public pages: federal agencies, Missouri departments and statutes, and major nonprofits such as the Family Caregiver Alliance. The source's own numbers and year are quoted, not rounded. Each fact links, in the sentence where it appears, to the page it came from, and the sources page lists every URL with the date a person opened it.

The voice is deliberate. It takes your side on the labor, stays neutral on the people, and turns a grievance into something that can be assigned, split, paid for or declined on the record. The brother in Dallas and the sister with the power of attorney are the shape of the problem, not real people.

The worksheet and the tables

The fair-share worksheet on the front page and the two-column tables in the entries use blanks where a family owes itself an answer. They carry no dollar amounts and do no math, because the only numbers that matter are your family's own bills and hours.

The paid placement

One company pays to appear on this site: New Plan Care Solutions, an independently owned, non-medical in-home care company in Chesterfield. It is a client of OwnersFirm, the publisher, and the two companies are not commonly owned. Its featured slot on the front page, the short box at the end of each entry, and the footer line are all labelled as paid. It is not ranked against anyone, because nothing here ranks anyone.

The only form on the site is on the front page, and it sends what you type to New Plan Care Solutions and nowhere else. A phone number is optional there, and the company says it will contact you only in the way you choose. Nothing you read in an entry was changed for the advertiser.

What this site will not do

• Diagnose anyone, interpret symptoms, or give medication advice. Health questions go to Mom's doctor, and medication questions to the doctor or pharmacist.
• Publish a price, an hourly rate or a cost range it cannot source, including for the advertiser.
• Rank, score or criticize care companies, facilities, hospitals or hospices.
• Tell you how to sue a sibling, or give legal strategy. Powers of attorney, contracts and courts go to an attorney.
• Invent families, quotes, reviews or testimonials.
• Treat a family argument as abuse. Real fear that Mom is being hurt goes to the state hotline, 1-800-392-0210.

Corrections

Public pages move and programs change their rules. When a linked page no longer says what an entry quotes, the page wins and the entry is fixed: a person rereads the source, rewrites the sentence, and updates the date on the sources page. Dates on this site are the days a person checked, not the day a script ran. Entries are not quietly rewritten to match a new position; if a fact changes, the sentence that depended on it changes with it.

For who runs the desk and why it exists, see about. For the path through the entries, see start here.