CBS News reports an Idaho healthcare facility will no longer be offering labor and delivery services, citing a shortage of doctors and a politicized healthcare environment.
An Idaho hospital will stop labor and delivery services, citing doctor shortages and the "political climate," the hospital announced Friday.
"Highly respected, talented physicians are leaving. Recruiting replacements will be extraordinarily difficult," Bonner General Health, located in the city of Sandpoint, said in a news release.
Pregnant women who utilized Bonner General, a 25-bed hospital, will now have to drive to hospitals or birthing centers in Coeur d'Alene or Spokane to give birth.
In 2022, doctors delivered 265 babies at Bonner General and admitted less than 10 pediatric patients, the hospital said.
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, abortion bans have added another challenge to rural hospitals that have struggled to keep their doors open and their facilities fully staffed and running.
According to Apple Maps, it would take roughly an hour and a half to drive 76 miles to Spokane, and at least an hour to drive 48 miles to Coeur d’Alene — and that’s when weather is good. There’s an obvious need for local birthing services. So, why would Sand Point (and Idaho) have trouble attracting physicians to provide gynecologic and obstetric care?
Keep in mind that those are expensive medical specialities to support because of the training and equipment requirements, malpractice insurance costs, and because it can be physically demanding. Forced-birth politicians in Idaho have made the practice of medicine even more difficult. Per the CBS report:
Idaho has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country. According to the Associated Press, in a court brief filed in August 2022 in support of a Justice Department lawsuit against the Idaho abortion ban, medical groups argued that Idaho physicians are forced to choose whether to break state or federal law.
In a report last September, Pew found that Idaho was one of six states in which authorities can prosecute health care providers for performing abortions.
"The Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care. Consequences for Idaho Physicians providing the standard of care may include civil litigation and criminal prosecution, leading to jail time or fines," Bonner General said in its news statement.
emphasis added
The Republican war on women is part of the GOP war on healthcare in general. Hospitals are closing in rural areas in Red States because they can’t afford to treat people who can’t pay — but they can’t deny them emergency care either. The refusal by Republicans to expand Medicaid in red states is killing people for lack of ready access to health care because of those closings.
Idaho does have Medicaid expansion — but only because voters were able to pass it through a referendum. Republicans being Republicans, they did what they could to keep voters from getting what they voted for:
...But Idaho lawmakers took a round-about approach to implement the ballot initiative. Early in the 2019 legislative session, some of the state’s conservative lawmakers began working to draft legislation that would call for various restrictions on Medicaid expansion, including things like work requirements, copays, premiums, or lifetime limits on coverage. Rep. John VanderWoude, R-Nampa, noted in early 2019 that although the details were still being sorted out at that point, “if we do nothing, then we’re left with full-blown Medicaid expansion.”
Idaho S.1204 was designed to move the state forward with expansion, but with various additional restrictions — most notably, a work requirement — despite the fact that 61% of Idaho’s voters approved a “clean” (i.e., not modified) expansion of Medicaid in the November 2018 election. And a poll conducted in February 2019 indicated that nearly three-quarters of the state’s residents wanted lawmakers to implement Medicaid expansion as called for in Proposition 2, while just 17% wanted lawmakers to make changes to how expansion would be implemented.
Republican healthcare fanaticism is likely part of why the U.S. is now leading the developed world in maternal mortality death rates. There used to be a saying — the GOP’s “right to life” ends at birth. For the people of Sand Point, Idaho, it doesn’t even extend to birth now.
For an overview of the problem and possible solutions, the Commonwealth Fund’s analysis has this to say:
The U.S. is the only country in this analysis that does not provide universal health care, leaving nearly 8 million women of reproductive age uninsured. Eleven states have yet to expand their Medicaid programs, leaving hundreds of thousands of women of reproductive age — who are disproportionately Black — in the Medicaid coverage gap and vulnerable to the current provision that allows states to end coverage 60 days postpartum.
The Biden administration’s proposal to extend Medicaid coverage to one year postpartum would provide millions of lower-income women with needed health care during the postpartum period, a time when many women die because of lack of adequate care. Comprehensive reproductive health coverage and other proposals from the administration, including expanding and diversifying the maternal care workforce, could decrease the number of preventable deaths and also reduce racial and ethnic inequities in U.S. maternal deaths.
The Republican Party is opposed to all of the above proposals that would address the problem — which just goes to show “Party of Life” is just another Big Lie.