Author: Reporter

It started a couple of years ago when Juliana Pache was doing a crossword puzzle and got stuck. She was unfamiliar with the reference that the clue made. It made her think about what a crossword puzzle would look like if the clues and answers included more of some subjects that she WAS familiar with, thanks to her own identity and interests — Black history and Black popular culture. When she could not find such a thing, Pache decided to do it herself. In January 2023, she created blackcrossword.com, a site that offers a free mini-crossword puzzle every day....

Lou Gehrig’s disease took away Grace Armant’s ability to speak, but the 84-year-old still has plenty to say about her insurance. UnitedHealthcare has rejected several requests from her doctors for coverage of a machine Armant needs to breathe as she deals with the fatal illness. “They are no good,” Armant said, typing slowly into a device that speaks for her. “I can’t do without the machine.” Doctors around the country say UnitedHealthcare and other insurers have made it harder to get coverage for certain home ventilators that patients like Armant need as their lungs fail. They say patients often...

As rural hospitals continue to struggle financially, a new type of hospital is slowly taking root, especially in the Southeast. Rural emergency hospitals receive more than $3 million in federal funding a year and higher Medicare reimbursements in exchange for closing all inpatient beds and providing 24/7 emergency care. While that makes it easier for a hospital to keep its doors open, experts say it does not solve all of the challenges facing rural health care. People might have to travel further for treatments for illnesses that require inpatient stays, like pneumonia or COVID-19. In some of the communities...

Norma Upshaw was living alone south of Nashville when her doctor said she needed to start in-home dialysis. Her closest family lived 40 miles away, and they had already scrambled once when the independent senior living facility the 82-year-old had called home — a community of largely Black residents — had closed with 30 days’ notice. Here they were searching, yet again, for an assisted living facility or maybe an affordable apartment that was closer. They could not find either, so Upshaw’s daughter built a small apartment onto her home. “Most of her doctors, her church, everything was within...