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.
Virginia has a Republican governor and a Republican House, it’s a purple state with a looming threat of abortion restrictions.
If you’re talking about the broader movement of people into red states, sure - they have lower housing prices and a lot of factory jobs - but in professions like medicine and teaching where we have massive staffing shortages and jobs available everywhere, people are moving to blue states.
(and in fact, as the qualify of life in red states continues to degrade - due to climate change and the consequences of all of those professionals fleeing - you’ll probably continue to see their costs of living go down, and more factories open there to take advantage of that low cost of living and the commensurately low wages they have to pay; we may ultimately find ourselves in a situation where young healthy people move to a red state for a decade or so to accumulate some savings before moving to a blue state to raise their family)