Editorial policy

A gap in our data is never presented as an absence of problems. That is the rule the rest of this page is made of. Almost every practice here exists because the opposite is so easy to do by accident: a total that quietly excludes what we could not read, a badge that does not appear because the record behind it was missing, a filter that returns a short list and lets it look complete.

What we publish

Facility data reproduced from public government sources, with each figure naming its source and the date the publisher issued it — not the date we downloaded it. Where we compute something ourselves, the methodology says what and how. Where a state publishes a licence number, we show it, so a claim on this site can be checked against the state's own register rather than taken on trust.

What we withhold, and why

When we cannot verify that a source is current, a record with entries still shows them under a note saying the set may be incomplete. A record that looks empty is withheld instead, because an unverified empty record is indistinguishable from a clean one. Rankings exclude facilities whose record we cannot verify, and we say how many were excluded, because a list drawn from partial data is a list of what we could see. A figure derived from a stale record is withheld with it — the CMS star rating goes when the inspection score behind it does.

The same discipline applies to categories: we call a community memory care only where its state licenses or designates it as such, and name the state's own designation otherwise. Where a state publishes no inspection extract at all, we say so on the page rather than showing a blank record that reads as a clean one.

What we do not do

No facility, chain, or referral company pays to be listed, ranked, hidden, or recommended — see how we are funded. There is no lead form and no adviser wall. We do not estimate a figure we cannot compute, and we do not soften a claim to make it publishable: if we cannot support it, it comes off the page. We do not present our tools as individualized medical, legal, tax, or placement advice.

Judgment, where it appears

Plain-English summaries and red flags involve our judgment. Each flag is triggered by a disclosed rule applied to the government record, the rule is stated, and the underlying citation sits next to it so you can disagree with our reading and still have the facts. Citations under formal dispute are marked as disputed on the page.

If a page ever asks you to trust us rather than check us, that is our error. Our corrections policy says what to do about it.