Delaware County PA Office of Services for the Aging (COSA) senior services, OPTIONS care management, and where Community HealthChoices and LIFE take over.
By Philly Senior Advisor Care Team — Benefits & Costs Team · October 4, 2026
Families who grew up in Philadelphia often assume that every Pennsylvania county works the way the city does, with one big agency, one hotline, and one set of neighborhood offices. In Philadelphia that agency is the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging, a nonprofit that the city contracts to act as its Area Agency on Aging. Delaware County does it differently. When an adult child in Media, Upper Darby, Springfield, or Chester needs help for a parent, the local door to knock on is the Delaware County Office of Services for the Aging, which nearly everyone shortens to COSA. It is the county's designated Area Agency on Aging, and if you are researching Delaware County PA Office of Services for the Aging COSA senior services before you tour a single facility, you are starting in the right place.
The distinction matters because the Pennsylvania Department of Aging does not deliver services directly to individuals. It funds and oversees the Area Agencies on Aging across the Commonwealth, and each one is responsible for the older residents of its own county or, in Philadelphia's case, its consolidated city-county. That means a Delaware County resident cannot call the Philadelphia agency for a care assessment, and a Philadelphia parent who moves in with a daughter in Havertown will have to be re-enrolled with the Delaware County office. Knowing which agency owns your parent's address saves a week of transferred calls and misdirected paperwork.
The core job of an Area Agency on Aging is not placement, which surprises many families. It is information, assessment, and coordination. COSA staff can talk through what a parent is struggling with, whether that is meal preparation, bathing, managing medications, getting to appointments, or loneliness, and then connect the family to the services that exist in the county. Those typically include home-delivered meals, congregate meals at senior community centers, in-home personal assistance, caregiver support, transportation help, and protective services when there is a concern about neglect or exploitation. No one at the agency will tell you which assisted living community to choose, but they can help you work out whether your parent can stay home with support first.
Delaware County is an interesting case because it contains very different housing stock and very different household incomes. Older residents in Upper Darby often live in twin homes and rowhouses with steep stairs, much like Philadelphia neighbors a few blocks across the city line. Residents in the western townships may live in larger homes with long driveways and few neighbors in walking distance. A good intake conversation takes that into account, because the realistic plan for a widow in an Upper Darby twin is not the same as the plan for a retired couple in a rural stretch of the county, and transportation alone can change which services are practical.
Most of the in-home help an Area Agency on Aging arranges for people who are not on Medicaid flows through the Pennsylvania Department of Aging's OPTIONS Program. OPTIONS is funded in large part by the Pennsylvania Lottery, which is why it exists as a state-run program rather than a federal one. It begins with a care management assessment, usually done at home by a county care manager, who looks at what the older adult can and cannot do and builds a plan around it. Depending on the plan and the person's finances, OPTIONS can help pay for in-home personal care, adult day services, home-delivered meals, and some equipment or home modifications.
Unlike Community HealthChoices, OPTIONS does not use a Medicaid-style spend-down. It does use a sliding fee scale, so families with more income may be asked to contribute a share of the cost of services. For a lot of Delaware County households, that is the point: OPTIONS fills the gap between needing a little help and needing a lot of help, which is exactly the stretch in which a family is most tempted to spend savings on a private-pay agency at $28 to $36 an hour. A call to COSA before hiring a private aide can reveal whether any of that cost could have been covered.
There is a real handoff point between the county aging network and Pennsylvania's Medicaid long-term care system. Community HealthChoices, or CHC, is the mandatory managed-care program for long-term services and supports, run through the Department of Human Services' Office of Long-Term Living and delivered by managed-care organizations. If your parent's income and assets are low enough, and a functional assessment shows a need for nursing-facility level of care, CHC may be the right door. Aging office staff can explain that threshold and point families to the right enrollment path, but they do not decide CHC eligibility themselves. CHC also covers personal care in a home or a licensed residence, but it does not pay room and board.
It is also worth keeping a third option in mind. LIFE, the Pennsylvania name for the national PACE model, serves people who are nursing-home eligible but want to remain in the community, and LIFE Philadelphia is a well-known provider on the city side of the county line. Delaware County residents should ask whether a LIFE program serves their zip code. Mixing these up is easy, because Pennsylvania also has a separate prescription-drug program called PACE and PACENET that has nothing to do with long-term care placement. Three programs, three agencies, and three different sets of rules.
The best first call is not a crisis call. It is a short, organized conversation in which you can answer a few basic questions: your parent's full name and date of birth, their address, their approximate monthly income, whether they have Medicare or Medicaid, and the three or four things that have become hard in the last six months. If a parent has been in a hospital stay, ask the discharge planner whether a referral to the county aging office has already been made. Often it has, and the family simply has not been told.
Expect a screening call first and a home visit later, with some wait time in between. If there is a safety concern, such as a parent who is wandering, being financially exploited, or living without working heat, say so plainly, because protective services follow a different and faster track. And if you are the long-distance child living in another state, you can still make the call, though the agency will want to speak to your parent directly for consent. Writing down the name of the person you spoke with, and the date, makes every later call easier.
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