Reporting Texas
News and features from UT-Austin's School of Journalism
byErika González
Hundreds of workers in Texas’ rural hospitals face long shifts but without any certainty that their hospital will still be there next year.
Texas leads the nation in rural hospital closures, according to the Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals. In the past 20 years, 26 rural hospitals have shut their doors.
Data from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a nonprofit research organization focused on improving quality and payment systems, show that 108 of the state’s 156 rural hospitals have reduced or lost critical services and that 22 face immediate risk of closure.
byNatalia Rodriguez
Twelve representatives of Students for a Democratic Society staged a sit-in Friday as part of a protest at the University of Texas Tower to demand the school reject a “compact” offered by the Trump administration.
byDestiny Lewis
Chanting “do not sign,” dozens of University of Texas students Monday protested the university’s potential support of the Trump administration’s college compact, a pledge critics say threatens academic freedom, diversity and freedom of speech on campus.. “
The protest, organized by Students for a Democratic Society, was the second UT demonstration opposing the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” an offer of preferential funding for schools that agreed to follow the administration’s priorities. Although the UT System regents chairman initially welcomed the offer, the university has not announced a final decision.
byRachel N. Madison
In 2020, Austin resident Zachary Cook was run over by a car while walking down a sidewalk. After several weeks in a hospital for severe injuries, he returned home to find a $78,000 medical bill in the mail. Unable to pay, Cook searched for assistance online and found Dollar For, a national nonprofit that helps patients navigate medical debt and health care expense reduction programs.
“There was nothing stated in the hospital to me about charity care,” Cook told Texas lawmakers last spring. “I was just very lucky that I found an organization that could help me out.”
Cook’s story is one of many that inspired UT students to form Let’s Crush Medical Debt, an Austin chapter of Dollar For. The group works to spread awareness of federal medical bill forgiveness programs like charity care.
