Abortion bans, anti-vax ideology, and other right-wing culture-war issues are creating a mass exodus of doctors from red states. Conservative voters will end up paying with their lives for the policies they wanted.
It’s a bad time to be pregnant in Idaho:
Bonner General Health, the only hospital in Sandpoint, announced Friday that it will no longer provide obstetrical services to the city of more than 9,000 people, meaning patients will have to drive 46 miles for labor and delivery care.
… “The Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care,” the hospital’s news release said. “Consequences for Idaho physicians providing the standard of care may include civil litigation and criminal prosecution, leading to jail time or fines.”
… The release also said highly respected, talented physicians are leaving the state, and recruiting replacements will be “extraordinarily difficult.”
Sandpoint, Idaho is a case in point. It used to be a medical hub for north Idaho, Montana and Washington, with an ob-gyn ward that delivered hundreds of babies each year—until the fall of Roe and the enactment of abortion bans.
In March, Sandpoint’s obstetrics department completely shut down as doctors fled. Idaho women with high-risk pregnancies now have to travel much further for medical care, like St. Luke’s hospital in Boise. But that one may soon be closed too. It has only six doctors left, most of whom are near the end of their careers. Two younger, recent recruits have already left the state.
Anticipating the likely result, Idaho’s conservative legislature took action. They stopped collecting data on maternal mortality.
...Texas is an especially sharp example of the problem. Doctors are fleeing the state, worsening a shortage that was already at critical levels:
Almost every provider I spoke with for this story has thought about leaving their practice or leaving Texas in the wake of S.B. 8 and Dobbs. Several have already moved or stopped seeing patients here, at least in large part because of the abortion bans. “If I was ever touch a patient again, it won’t be in the state of Texas,” said Charles Brown, chair of the Texas district of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), who stopped seeing patients last year after decades working as a maternal fetal medicine specialist.
…In 2022, 15 percent of the state’s 254 counties had no doctor, according to data from the state health department, and about two-thirds had no OB-GYN. Texas has one of the most significant physician shortages in the country, with a shortfall that is expected to increase by more than 50 percent over the next decade, according to the state’s projections. The shortage of registered nurses, around 30,000, is expected to nearly double over the same period.
And of course the whole thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy; healthcare in these areas will get worse. And then so will public health. And then people will blame healthcare for not working (but that's not the problem).
"When we find out that the world does not possess the objective value or meaning that we want it to have or have long since believed it to have, we find ourselves in a crisis" Friedrich Nietzsche