Conservative voters will end up paying with their lives for the policies they wanted.

Red states are suffering brain drain, and not just in Idaho. Doctors are packing up and leaving states like Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, and more.

Wyoming has one of the worst physician shortages in the country, with rural hospitals closing their maternity wards. Meanwhile, the state legislature is mulling an abortion ban that will make the problem worse. In South Carolina, more than one-third of counties have no prenatal care at all. In Missouri, rural hospitals are closing in droves.

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.

  • Sorchist
    20•10 months ago

    Here’s an unbiased source.

    https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/population-decline-by-state

    People are indeed getting the hell out of certain blue states, NY, CA, and IL, probably cause they’re fucking expensive to live in - at least in the big cities where most of the population is.

    And FL, TX, ID, SD, and MT are picking up population. ID, ST, and MT are tiny population wise so any change there is a blip, but people seem to really be moving into FL, SC, and TX, for whatever reason.

    This data is a couple years old so it wouldn’t reflect recent legal and political changes.

    Here’s the thing though. Changes in total population of a state on this list are all between -1% and +2%. That matters, but it’s not like whole towns are being depopulated or anything.

    The brain drain issue – doctors fleeing red states – sounds like it’s considerably more dramatic than that, given that most TX counties have zero gynecologists and a significant fraction have zero doctors.

    • Nougat
      7•10 months ago

      Yeah, that’s another thing I was thinking - overall population changes in a state isn’t very useful when the topic is about highly skilled labor, or professionals in particular fields leaving some states.