The family is searching at 2 a.m.,
and your listing has to answer them.

How it was researched

Researched and written September 13 and 14, 2026. Every reference was opened live on those dates and read against the sentence it supports; figures were transcribed from the source page, and where a source gave a qualifier the sentence keeps it. Primary sources were preferred: the Code of Federal Regulations text for the Funeral Rule, the consumer reviews rule, HIPAA, and the hospice conditions of participation; California's Business and Professions Code on the legislature's own site for state online price posting; FTC press releases, business guidance, and the rule topic page for the rule review status; CMS and CAHPS Hospice Survey pages for hospice reporting; Medicare.gov for coverage; state licensing boards for lookups; NFDA, CANA, Pew, BrightLocal, and the National Alliance for Care at Home for survey and industry figures. The NFDA 2025 Consumer Awareness and Preferences figures come from a trade-press republication of NFDA's release because NFDA's own release page returns a 404, checked again on September 14, 2026. MORTL directory facts and Featured prices were read from the live Find Help and Become Featured pages on mortl.com and checked against the site's source code (shared/featuredProvider.ts) on the same day. A claim-versus-source pass on September 14, 2026 reopened all 42 references, corrected the sentences that overstated or misdated what a page said, and added sources for three claims that had none. A second, adversarial pass on September 14, 2026 reopened the sources behind every statutory, dollar, day-count, and percentage claim in the book and spot-checked all four tables row by row against the agency page or the statute; it tightened five sentences that had dropped a qualifier the source carries, and changed no figure. Sources that blocked automated reading weren't cited, and they're named in the limits below.

This is general information, not legal advice. This book can't tell you whether a specific practice is legal in your state. The Funeral Rule is federal; state funeral, cemetery, and preneed law adds requirements the FTC's pages don't list, including online price posting in California , and your state board or association is the source for those. The HIPAA discussion is general: whether a given funeral home, hospice, or counseling practice is a covered entity depends on how it bills, and a privacy lawyer should confirm it before you rely on it. The book doesn't cover Medicare Advantage, Medicaid hospice rules by state, or advertising rules for Medicare-certified providers beyond what's cited. Three sources we set out to read returned 403 to automated access on the day of writing and are therefore not cited: the Association for Death Education and Counseling's certification pages, PSYPACT's site, and the HHS Office for Civil Rights pages on HIPAA and online reviews; the HIPAA statements here rest on the regulation text instead. Medicare's Care Compare tool loads as an application rather than a readable page, so its content is described through CMS's own reporting pages. Survey figures are the surveys' figures: NFDA's sample is adults 40 and older, Pew's review data is from 2016, BrightLocal's panel is 1,002 adults and the company sells reputation software, and none of them measure your county. Prices for MORTL's Featured tiers are the prices on the Become Featured page at this edition; that page is authoritative if they change. CMS's CAHPS Hospice Survey page still describes the 47-question, eight-measure version of the survey, while CMS's current-measures page and the survey's own site describe the revised 38-question, nine-measure version; the book follows the two current pages and says so.

42 sources, each read on the date shown in the book.