Thesis #6 — You cannot legislate the practice of medicine into a felony and expect physicians to remain.
Wednesday’s Signal told you the OBs are leaving and the replacements are not coming.
Today’s Briefing maps what to do about it.
1,104 U.S. counties are now classified as maternity care deserts. 116 rural hospitals have ended labor and delivery between 2020 and 2025. The pipeline that feeds the next generation of OB/GYNs is twelve years long. The decisions being made about where to train in 2024 are the workforce reality of the 2030s and 2040s.
There are specific, named, existing federal tools — funded, with bipartisan precedent — that could begin to rebuild this. The Briefing names them. The challenge is not policy design. The challenge is which states will use them, and which ones will not.
When the last OB/GYN leaves a rural county and the hospital closes its labor and delivery unit, here is what happens to the pregnant woman who lives there. She drives. Or an ambulance drives. And the next clinical decision is made by a team that has never seen her.
That is what a maternity care desert is. It is not a policy label.
— Dr. Yamicia Connor, OB/GYN
Yesterday’s Signal :
The OB/GYNs Are Leaving. The Replacements Aren’t Coming. — Twelve years to make one. Five years to break the pipeline. Idaho is the case study.
Read the full series:
You can read me anywhere. There are louder takes. There are faster newsfeeds. There are bigger names. What you get here that you don’t get anywhere else is THE SPINE — a permanent argumentative scaffold you can stand on, walk along, share with the people you’re trying to convince, and keep coming back to over years.
The reason your premium went up $1,000. The reason your sister’s cancer trial got pulled. The reason Pap smears are disappearing from rural counties.
THEY ARE THE SAME REASON.
That’s the case we’re making, week after week, until the country can see it.
Thank you for being here. Forward this to one person who needs the spine.
— YC
Founder & CEO, Diosa Ara | Creator & Editor-in-Chief, The Labora Collective
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