Had hoped to provide a link to the Globe and Mail article on this but my gifts are used up for the month. A couple of excerpts on an Idaho article will have to suffice. Profitability coupled with changing abortion laws I seems to be a problem.
** Labour and delivery units have been closing across the country for decades. That’s what’s leading to the worsening maternal morbidity and mortality,” said Leilah Zahedi-Spung, a maternal-fetal medicine physician and family planning provider who moved to Colorado this year from Tennessee, where lawmakers made abortion a felony crime.
Changes related to abortion laws are “only going to accelerate” childbirth deaths, she said. They may also widen gaps in the quality of care between states where doctors are free to provide service and those where they are constrained.
The new law in Idaho may have delivered the final blow, but the closure of obstetrics at Bonner General was, in some ways, years in the making. The medical compensation structure in the United States means that birthing services are “money losers, even in good years,” said Ford Elsaesser, a bankruptcy lawyer who chairs the hospital’s board. Just about any other service – including colonoscopies, mammograms, knee replacements and gall bladder surgery – is more profitable.
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