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.
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What? Republicans aren’t satisfied having surgery performed on them by fellow Right-wingers who got their doctorate at the College of Common Sense and did their surgical residency at the Can-Do-Attitude Hospital?
I thought academia in general was a leftist plot to turn kids lgbtq that you wanted to burn to the ground?
Hey white women you probably should have recognized you were a political class that had more in common with black women and trans people than white men and voted accordingly, sorry about the next decade or so, we’ll keep trying to unfuck you
Decade? You’re optimistic.
Bad title tbh. It should be called something like “physician flight from red states” or something.
Some places prefer you not change the title of the article.
But agreed, it’s a dumb title that misses the point. I thought this was about power outages based on title.
I was able to guess that it was about brain drain, but only because I thought linemen were leaving red states leading to unstable electrical service
The “journalist” or the machine that’s pretending to be a “journalist”, made the initial error.
Yes let’s argue about the title here instead of the egregious issue on display
Or at least “The hospital lights are flickering in Red America.”
I work in research, not medicine, but I see the brain drain in my circle. We were the first to leave but many of my colleagues indicate they’ll follow soon. The relative sanity of Austin wasn’t enough to keep us in Texas.
You only have to look at the Houston “independent” school district to see how fragile the “relative sanity” is, not surprised people are leaving
The more time goes on the more I wish we just let the south secede so they’d stop dragging the rest of us down with them.
The thing that I have trouble with are the people left behind who don’t have the freedom or ability to go north
I wish taxes and services were tied to registered political party.
It’s totally impractical but would be so funny for these fucks to pay tolls every time they turn onto a new road.
Need to file a police report for a stolen catalytic converter? No problem. There’s just a $600 processing fee to file that report.
Need FEMA aid? Sure. We’ll just look at the funds in the Republican FEMA account and the balance is … get fucked. Here’s your share of getting fucked. Have a nice life.
I guess in the long run we’re getting a watered down version of it. Too bad they can’t see it happening from inside Trump’s rectum.
The zombie apocalypse will be the result of decades of Republicans attacks on education. Hordes of drooling hillbillies reciting Fox New talking points and threatening their fellow countrymen for reasons they are not able to articulate.
Isn’t that already happening?
Because people don’t want to live in those shitholes, and they are right. Those who can goes.
Conservatives want pure red states to live in, and they’re getting their wish granted. Though it should be noted that they were wanted that research has shown that tech and academic fields were dominated by liberal leaning people. What did they think would happen when they went full Handmaid’s Tale?
EDIT FOR THE CONSERVATIVE READING THIS:
All the smart-brain folk left. Only dumb folk remain.
People are fleeing blue states too. One of the most left states is a blue state. Whats the correlation?
one is because of high rent, the other is because it’s impossible to practice medicine or survive as a gay person. the former will be solved as soon as statewide zoning reform is a thing, and some states are very slowly getting the ball rolling on that
Or taxes and rampant crime…
The crime thing is just a talking point that people throw around, and is demonstrably untrue. There’s no conclusive evidence to suggest that either red or blue states have higher crime rates: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/04/12/newsoms-claim-that-trump-states-have-highest-murder-rates/
As far as taxes go, at least we have decent infrastructure and social services compared to a lot of red states. Rent sucks but hey that’s what happens if you want to live in a highly desirable city
violent crime rates are higher in red states, which makes sense since their policies lead to more poverty and poverty leads to desperation which leads to walking into a liquor store with a gun and demanding the cash in the register because the landlords gonna file for eviction soon and you’re outta options
I live in a blue state with the highest crime rate in the country so eh, I respect your opinion but just nah. This place is not a utopia or even close to it because of left leaning policies. It’s actually a hell hole directly because of them.
Which state do you believe that is?
He speaks of higher violent crime rates and you counter with highest crime rates. How is this relevant?
Can you show a source on that? I’m in a heavy blue state with streaks of red in the outer eastern edge…but where the population is, it’s blue… And we have had a boom in incoming residence… I know three doctors who moved to my state specifically.
Are you talking doctors or population?
Many of the blue states are losing to the red states but it’s not universally true.
Here is an article on the topic.
https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/states-move-to-from/
Forbes was once a respected place for business journalism. I don’t know exactly when or why, but now it’s really just blog opinion trash.
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.
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.
That’s not even remotely true… our state has doubled in residency per our recent consensus and that was before all this and it’s still on record for being one of the most traveled to states to move too… we have some of the best state healthcare and are very liberal in women’s health, we back our teachers independence and we don’t exclude parents either… Our state has many issues, but not enough that we are losing residents in mass, especially to the red states…
What you are talking about is the switch… we are seeing like minded people move to like minded places. Conservative from blue states, moved to red states and vice versa for democratic/liberal voters to blue… it’s also quite anecdotal in the end.
… our state has doubled in residency per our recent [census] …
What state, which census, and when was the last census?
Edit: Apparently asking details behind a seemingly impossible assertion is worth a downvote, huh?
I cited the article. Do you have an opposing cite? Just because the population grew doesn’t mean people didn’t move away.
I doubt it has less to do with ideology and more to do with the cost of living. I know very few people who moved from Oregon to Texas because of politics. It is almost always because of cost of living. Just like the people I know who moved to Oregon didn’t do so because of the politics. They normally moved for the outdoor life.
That article seems to be an unlabeled opinion piece. I can’t find any real data or citations there.
So you have a citation to refute it?
What can be asserted without citation, can be dismissed without citation. Bye Felicia.
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)
Cost of living’s too high?
Well I would think there’s a correlation between left states and blue states, for one
