Michigan Ross Professor Sarah Miller Joins KCBS San Francisco to Discuss How Reproductive Health Care Access Affects Economics
Announced in October 2023, Michigan Ross and the Financial Times are partnering on a monthly poll to track how American voters perceive financial and economic issues in the lead-up to the 2024 US presidential election. The poll will run for 12 months leading up to the election.
Sarah Miller joined Liz Saint John of KCBS San Francisco on Feb. 24 to discuss the results of February's Financial Times-Michigan Ross poll. Miller and Saint John discussed the economic impact that some may see on the heels of the Roe v. Wade reversal that now limits access to reproductive health care for women.
"...now we have 21 states where abortion is either banned or severely curtailed," said Miller. "And as you mentioned, we're starting to see those have implications in places like Alabama for things like IVF, where maybe people didn't quite expect there would be such repercussions."
"You've seen a lot of companies say that they will pay for their employees to go out of state to get access to reproductive reproductive health care. You have big companies like Salesforce, and a few other smaller companies as well being willing actually to move their employees out of state. And I think it's also affecting on the hiring side. If you're trying to attract someone to come into your state and take a job, I think there are going to be implications there as well. The labor market is really tight right now. So it's really hard to hire. And this is definitely not helping. We've had Austin (Texas) based companies like Bumble say that they've seen as much as a third of their workforce say that they want to go remote, live in a different state outside of Texas because of these new restrictions."
"I think in the long term, it's going to have a lot bigger impact as the people unwilling to move to certain states migration patterns start changing. And I think especially in the medical industry, where you have, perhaps, physician shortages already in some areas, and doctors might be very reluctant to move to a state where providing adequate health care for their patients could land them in prison. I think there have already been concerns, especially for OBGYNs, about moving into states. And then there's also research in economics that shows that in the long term, over a wide enough time horizon, this can also affect things like educational attainment, teen pregnancies, and different economic outcomes for women who might make different choices if they live somewhere where they know they don't have total control over their reproductive future."
