MIAA Tournament Management Committee: Higher hockey seeds can select quarterfinal sites

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FRANKLIN – Scott Paine knows it would add a lot more onto his plate as the MIAA statewide hockey tournament director.

He also wants to ensure that as many people as possible enjoy the postseason experience.

At Tuesday’s MIAA Tournament Management Committee meeting, the group voted unanimously that tournament games beginning with the quarterfinals (Round of 8) would be played at neutral facilities. For this round only, the higher seed would be allowed to select what was previously approved by the TMC with the understanding Paine would have final say.

“I remember last year’s Reading-Braintree game in the Round of Eight where Braintree got the home game (at Zapustas Rink in Randolph) and we wound up turning away nearly 2,000 people,” Paine said. “We have great venues like Gallo, Loring, Stoneham, Chelmsford, Olympia, Woburn and Tsongas with more seating and they have proven that they want to host games.”

Hockey is unique from most other MIAA sports in that few schools have their own ice hockey facilities. Even with a mandated minimum of 1,000 seats required to host a quarterfinal contest, some schools have become creative in their attempts to reach a magical number. Members pointed out that some schools used portable bleachers and folding chairs in hopes of reaching the magical number.

“To me, this is not providing the student-athletes with a quality experience,” said TMC chairman Shaun Hart of Burlington. “We’re trying to provide everyone with a great tournament experience.”

Another topic which has generated statewide interest are the power ratings, namely the way it is presently set up. Many schools have clamored for a wins proponent to add into the formula. One of those who have brought up a desire to see something along those lines is Wellesley athletic director John Brown.

“I remember one year where Brookline, Natick and Wellesley were the top three girls teams in the Bay State Conference,” Brown said. “Brookline beat both Natick and Wellesley twice and Natick and Wellesley split. You would think Brookline would have been the higher seed, but they actually wound up third because they played a defensive style and won a lot of games by 1-0 score, whereas us and Natick would win games by two and three goals.”

Hart understands the angst, but is hesitant to tamper with a system which is producing at more than 80 percent accurate rate at the current time. That being said, Hart and MIAA assistant director Jim Clark (who created the power rankings) have discussed the possibility of tinkering with the formula in order to please with constituents. Clark said a sample would be produced at the next TMC meeting in November.

In other news, the TMC voted unanimously to approve the formats for each of the winter sports. At the suggestion of MIAA volleyball liaison Sherry Bryant, the committee agreed to move up the release of the volleyball brackets from Tuesday, Oct. 31 to Monday, Oct. 30. The committee also agreed to act upon a suggestion by track liaison Keith Brouillard to change the order of waves at the divisional cross-country meets from C, A, B to A, B, C.

Britney Spears’ ‘The Woman in Me’: 8 takeaways from a book full of fury

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By Christie D’Zurilla, Los Angeles Times

Britney Spears is angry. Very, very angry.

“The Woman in Me,” the singer’s new memoir, is about more than just venting, of course. She offers detailed, cogent accounts of indignities that would leave anyone seething. But Spears has clearly packed away a lot of frustration over the course of her 41 years — particularly toward the people who enabled her conservatorship, including much of her family, and toward the swarms of paparazzi who badgered her nonstop.

“The Woman in Me,” by Britney Spears. (Gallery Books/TNS)

And don’t get her started on Justin Timberlake. Not right now. But soon.

The book tracks Spears’ life from childhood to the not-quite-present — it ends before her brief marriage to Sam Asghari did — and it kicks off with a litany of relatives who showed signs of mental illness or alcoholism. Spears’ past is full of givers and receivers of abuse, including her grandma Jean, who in 1966 fatally shot herself with a shotgun on the grave of the son she lost three days after he was born. Jean was only 31.

In short, Spears didn’t have a blueprint for a normal life, and a normal life is far from the one she has led since becoming a pop phenomenon.

It’s a lot for anyone to take on — or take in. Here are eight takeaways from “The Woman in Me,” which goes on sale Tuesday.

She once had power to burn

Spears became a star with the release of “… Baby, One More Time” when she was 16.

Four years later, she was playing the 2001 Super Bowl halftime show, which she calls “just one of the seemingly endless good things happening for me.”

“I landed the ‘most powerful woman’ spot on the Forbes list of most powerful celebrities — the following year I’d be number one overall,” Spears writes. She was getting offers that included Pepsi commercials and the movie “Crossroads,” though the latter put her off acting: She didn’t enjoy how she disappeared into her character.

“When I think back on that time, I was truly living the dream, living my dream. My tours took me all over the world,” she says, and she was having fun and “being 19.” She turned down a role in the movie version of “Chicago,” which she seems to regret. And she wishes she’d had even more fun.

“I had power back then; I wish I’d used it more thoughtfully,” she says, “been more rebellious.”

She says she never had a drinking problem. Adderall, however …

“I liked to drink, but it was never out of control,” Spears writes, even as she tells stories about drinking with her mother when she was 12 and later partying with the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. She did plan a trip to Las Vegas with some tour friends in 2003, and says, “I was this little girl who had worked so much, and then all of a sudden the schedule was blank for a few days, and so: Hello, alcohol!” That’s when — apparently wasted — she married childhood pal Jason Alexander for 55 whole hours.

“Do you want to know my drug of choice?,” Spears asks. “The only thing I really did except for drinking? Adderall, the amphetamine that’s given to kids for ADHD. Adderall made me high, yes, but what I found far more appealing was that it gave me a few hours of feeling less depressed. It was the only thing that worked for me as an antidepressant, and I really felt like I needed one of those.”

Spears says she started taking Prozac in 2000 and had envelopes full of medicine handed to her while she was under the conservatorship, but never reveals what she is or isn’t taking at present.

But! She admits she smokes Virginia Slims. Smokes, present tense. Don’t tell the kids.

Justin Timberlake was a real jerk

J.T., whom Spears met when they were both on “The Mickey Mouse Club” as a child, was her first major love affair they reconnected years later. He also broke her heart badly while the two were living together. She says he cheated on her repeatedly; then he broke up with her via text message, went on an infamous PR tour bashing her and wrote songs that painted her as the bad guy in their relationship.

Sure, Britney cheated on Justin once too. She made out with choreographer Wade Robson, but that was it, she says.

“[A]s much as Justin hurt me, there was a huge foundation of love, and when he left me I was devastated,” Spears writes. “When I say devastated, I mean I could barely speak for months. Whenever anyone asked me about him, all I could do was cry. I don’t know if I was clinically in shock, but it felt that way.”

There was also the fact that she had once been pregnant with his child — a pregnancy she terminated after he insisted they were too young to have a baby. “I was told, ‘It might hurt a little,’” she said of her medically induced at-home miscarriage. Then she describes the cramping and agony she went through, lying on the bathroom floor as the medicine did its job. Timberlake, she writes, played guitar for her while she suffered.

Timberlake has since apologized for his behavior, albeit before the abortion story went public this week. But he cemented for Spears the idea that the world was run by and for men, while women wound up taking the heat for their misdeeds.

She would have been fine on her own, guys

And then, there was the conservatorship, which came after her messy divorce from Kevin Federline and the loss of custody over their children. “If they’d let me live my life, I know I would’ve followed my heart and come out of this the right way and worked it out,” Spears writes. “Thirteen years went by with me feeling like a shadow of myself. I think back now on my father and his associates having control over my body and my money for that long and it makes me feel sick.”

She compares herself to male musical artists who have gone through substance abuse or lost all their money without ever losing their freedom. “I didn’t deserve what my family did to me,” she concludes.

Saying ‘no’ got her held against her will and drugged

Spears goes into some detail about the months she spent in a “luxury” rehab facility in Beverly Hills, California, after her father told her over-the-counter “energy supplements” had been found in her purse. This happened just after she refused to do a dance move she considered too dangerous for her second Las Vegas residency — an engagement that was ultimately canceled.

“My father said that if I didn’t go, then I’d have to go to court, and I’d be embarrassed. He said, ‘We will make you look like a f— idiot, and trust me, you will not win. It’s better me telling you to go versus a judge in court telling you.’

“I felt like it was a form of blackmail and I was being gaslit,” she writes. “I honestly felt they were trying to kill me.”

In rehab she was taken off Prozac abruptly and put on lithium — a strong medication that her grandma Jean had been on — and forced to go through extensive therapy. She spent two months solo and then a month in a building with other patients.

“Three months into my confinement, I started to believe that my little heart, whatever made me Britney, was no longer inside my body anymore.”

And then there is Dad

These days Spears is done with her family, it appears — especially her father, Jamie. Mom Lynne, brother Bryan and sister Jamie Lynn are targets of disdain (mixed with a few brief moments of appreciation), but dear ol’ dad gets nothing but rage.

She blames Jamie’s alcoholism for “making us so poor” during her childhood, depicting a man who she says regularly drank himself beyond coherence. Jamie made millions off her while keeping her under his tight control for the 13 years of conservatorship, she alleges. And she says he berated her throughout — from her earliest years to the end of her conservatorship.

“You are a disgrace,” she quotes her father saying after she lost custody of her kids.

And when he became her conservator, he allegedly told her, “I’m Britney Spears now.”

P.S.: About Sam Asghari

Hasem, as Spears refers to her now-separated husband, Sam Asghari, seems to be her touchstone in mentions that are woven throughout the nearly 300-page book.

“Now my husband, Hesam, tells me that it’s a whole thing for beautiful girls to shave their heads,” she writes after giving her side of the story on that infamous head-shaving incident and her subsequent umbrella attack on a paparazzi’s car. “It’s a vibe, he says — a choice not to play into ideas of conventional beauty. He tries to make me feel better about it, because he feels bad about how much it still pains me.”

After dating for five years, the pair got married in June 2022, about a half a year after she undid her conservatorship. But in August, after the book was finished, Asghari filed for divorce from Spears.

And finally …

In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, she addresses her fans: “If you follow me on Instagram, you thought this book was going to be written in emojis, didn’t you?” She caps that comment with a string of single-rose emojis — and sincere thanks to her “collaborators,” who apparently know who they are.

After the Maui fire, some Hawaiians rethink aloha spirit. Is it for tourists, family, everyone?

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Jenny Jarvie | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

LAHAINA, Hawaii — Paele Kiakona is not ready to go back to work. Still reeling after August wildfires ravaged his hometown of Lahaina, he doesn’t want to serve tourists, pouring brut champagne or topping their mai tais with honey-liliko’i foam.

“I’ve seen people dead on the street,” Kiakona said. “My grandma’s house is gone. My whole town died.”

The 28-year-old Hawaii native who worked as a bartender at a farm-to-table restaurant north of Lahaina is wary of fielding questions, including what he says is now the ultimate dreaded icebreaker: “Did you lose your house in the fire?”

In this moment, he said, visitors aren’t the ones who need his care.

“Our aloha is reserved for our family right now,” Kiakona said. “It’s not just endless aloha.”

Hawaii is famous for its “aloha spirit,” a concept rooted in Native Hawaiian culture that long ago was commodified into the guiding philosophy for resorts and other businesses catering to tourists. More than a chill tropical greeting — an exotic salutation used in place of hello and goodbye — aloha is defined by state law as “mutual regard and affection” and extending “warmth in caring with no obligation in return.”

It’s a spirit that’s been in abundance among locals as people helped each other after the fire. But as tourists return to West Maui, edging closer to the charred ashes of a disaster in their search for paradise, some Hawaiians are reassessing what “aloha” means to them, and how much of it, exactly, they want to give to strangers when so many in their community have lost homes and loved ones.

They’re not withdrawing aloha, they say, just redefining and redistributing it.

“Aloha has commercially been sold as mai tais and a good time, and that the arms will be welcome and ready for you,” said Kaliko Kaauamo, 37, a taro farmer and curriculum writer for the Maui Arts and Cultural Center. “Aloha, it’s not always happy and sunshine and rainbows … sometimes having aloha is screaming and crying and being there to hold people in their grief.”

Ninety-eight people died from the fire that raged through the historic town of Lahaina on Aug. 8, destroying or damaging more than 2,200 structures. This month, the state reopened West Maui, even though many blue-collar residents say it is too soon to greet visitors with warm smiles, alohas and fresh flower leis.

Hawaiian hospitality is a core part of Maui’s economy. With nearly 40% of the island’s gross domestic product linked to tourism, Gov. Josh Green has argued that thousands of jobs and the region’s economy would be jeopardized if West Maui resorts remained shuttered to visitors. But a significant number of workers say they should not be expected to welcome tourists at the hotels and condos north of Lahaina until they have schools and stable housing.

More than 6,800 Lahaina residents are sheltering in hotel rooms or rental condos with no firm reassurance of how long they will be able to stay.

Kiakona, an organizer of the grassroots activist group Lahaina Strong, warned that tourists who flock to the golden sand beaches and hotels with swim-up grotto bars and spas offering $200 massages could face backlash from locals who fear they will be priced out of their hometown.

“We made our plea. You decided not to listen,” Kiakona said. “The blood is on your hands.”

As one West Maui resident wrote on a sign to protest the reopening: “FRESH OUT OF ALOHA.”

::

Tension has long existed between Hawaii locals and visitors.

In 1778, British explorer Capt. James Cook was welcomed when he anchored off the Hawaiian islands by locals eager to trade cuttlefish, breadfruit and pigs for nails and iron tools. But he and his sailors eventually overstayed their welcome, depleting supplies and spreading venereal diseases. Cook was eventually stabbed to death.

In the early 1800s, Christian missionaries arrived in Hawaii, encouraged by Native refugees who had fled after the brutal wars of King Kamehameha’s conquest and urged Westerners to evangelize the islands.

Then sugar and pineapple magnates from the U.S. and Europe followed, destroying the ecosystem by digging up native taro and banana trees and draining the wetlands to irrigate their plantations. They overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom’s Queen Liliuokalani in 1893, and five years later the U.S. annexed Hawaii.

By then the commercialization of “aloha” was already underway. George Kanahele, the late native Hawaiian historian and activist, wrote that aloha-themed souvenirs were popular among Hawaii’s earliest tourists. Among the bestsellers was sheet music for the song “Aloha Oe,” written and composed in 1878 by Queen Liliuokalani, when she was a princess. Later came the Aloha shirt, patented in 1936.

The allure of aloha as a slogan only grew after 1959, the year that Hawaii became a state and Pan American Airways inaugurated jet travel to Honolulu — part of a campaign by state leaders to reduce economic dependence on plantations by expanding tourism.

Today “aloha” is printed on cheap souvenir T-shirts, shot glasses and postcards depicting women in grass-skirts. It is etched below a rainbow on every Hawaiian vehicle license plate. It is even part of a job title as resorts hire “Aloha ambassadors” to share traditional Hawaiian cultural practices.

But Aloha goes deeper for many native Hawaiians. “Aloha” literally means [Alo] ‘presence’ and [Hā] ‘breath.’ Hawaii’s government introduced the Aloha Spirit law in 1986, an effort inspired by Pilahi Paki, a Maui-born poet and philosopher who spoke of the aloha spirit at a 1970 conference on the islands’ future.

At a time when the U.S. was entrenched in the Vietnam War and many Hawaiians felt they were losing links to their history, culture and language, Paki argued that “the world will turn to Hawaii as they search for world peace because Hawaii has the key … and that key is ALOHA.”

This idea of aloha as a radical act of love with no conditions attached has some wondering whether it allows outsiders to take advantage. Some Hawaiian cultural experts say aloha is a complex and fluid idea, too often misconstrued as a sweet and servile way of tolerating visitors.

“To suggest that Hawaiians avoid direct confrontation out of fear or some false notion of aloha is to ignore the whole set of operative values that Hawaiians respected, such as aggressiveness, courage, dignity, honor, competitiveness, and rivalry,” Kanahele wrote in “Ku Kanaka — Stand Tall: A Search For Hawaiian Values.”

After the fire, Kaauamo said, Maui residents were resetting boundaries.

“It’s Aloha 2.0., in that, as much as we serve others, it’s time to serve the self,” she said. “And as much as I give so freely to strangers, I will now give that to my neighbor, to people closer in the bubble.”

::

When Mahealani Criste sees tourists driving around the Lahaina bypass or carrying folding chairs to the beach, she wants to scream: What the hell are you guys doing here?

The 37-year-old reservations agent for a vacation rental company applied for a leave of absence without pay this month because she could not face going back to her job curating perfect vacations for visitors.

Answering questions about snorkel cruises and lomilomi massages felt like too much after her apartment complex — one of the few affordable housing units in town — collapsed in the fire. As she struggled to find a new rental for herself and her two children, she worried she might hang up on tourists, or scream, or cry.

“You’re making vacation dreams come true, setting their itinerary, but there is no itinerary,” she said flatly. “Our town burned.”

Still, some residents who lost their homes are welcoming tourists.

Beberlyn Aveno, a 56-year-old Filipino immigrant, was back selling puka shell necklaces at her kiosk at the Whalers Village shopping mall in Kaanapali recently. She wished more tourists were back; some days she made only $20.

But Aveno said it wasn’t just the money that kept her working; she would go crazy, she said, if she stayed in her cramped, temporary hotel room.

“It’s good to get out and have people to talk to,” she said. “I accept everyone. It’s healing.”

Grace Tadena, a 55-year-old Filipino immigrant and front desk agent at the Ritz Carlton 10 miles north of Lahaina, said she was glad the resort had reopened for tourism.

“It is the bread and butter. We can’t survive without our business.”

Most tourists, Tadena said, had been kind — and she, in turn, was not holding back her aloha, a value she embraced after moving to Hawaii in 1989. “Aloha stays with me wherever I am,” she said.

But many locals say they no longer have the bandwidth to overlook some visitors’ entitled or insensitive behavior.

Just days after the fire, locals were outraged when a charter boat brought tourists to snorkel around Lahaina before search and rescue teams had finished scouring the water for bodies. A few residents have almost come to blows with tourists who stopped on the side of highway to snap photos of the burn zone.

Courtney Lazo, 33, a real estate agent who grew up in Lahaina and lost her family home, could not bring herself to show properties — or aloha — to visitors as she struggled to find housing for her husband, two teens, father and 81-year-old grandma.

Tourists at the resort where she is staying have stopped her with questions. However well meaning they might have been, she finds it infuriating to explain her situation over and over to strangers.

“You’re choosing to vacation here in Lahaina and create memories in the middle of our broken lives and burnt downtown.”

::

Many visitors to Hawaii are charmed by the idea of aloha, locals say, without grasping the impact of their presence of the island.

“There’s postcard Hawaii — Elvis and Don Ho and grass skirts — what everybody comes here for,” said Naiwi Teruya, 35, a cook who worked before the fire as an executive chef at Down the Hatch seafood restaurant. “They don’t understand the struggles that the people who live here have been going through, like fighting for water for many, many, many generations.”

The fire, many locals argue, is a direct result of colonial and modern development practices that uprooted native trees and diverted water. Over the last half-century, a string of upscale resorts with tropical gardens, lavish pools and golf greens have risen north of Lahaina, draining water from local land and contributing to a housing crisis.

In recent decades, a growing number of visitors snapped up condos as second homes and short-term rentals. Now the median home price in the Lahaina area is $1.7 million, out of reach for blue-collar workers earning $20 to $25 an hour.

Many of those who are trying to find housing — to replace apartments that burned or to stay in while their homes are rebuilt or remain off-limits — blame outsiders for driving up prices.

Tiffany Teruya, 37, Naiwi’s sister and a single mother who lost her rental apartment in the fire, said she could not find a new place to live on west Maui for her and her 13-year-old son without government assistance. The cheapest apartment she could find cost $3,000 a month — more than double what she paid before the fire.

It is time, Teruya believes, to purge the island of short-term rentals.

“I would like to see vacation rentals gone from every neighborhood on the whole island,” Teruya told the city council. “Lots of us lost everything, and the very little some of us may have left, we going to fight for that.”

Pa’ele Kiakona (right) hugs Maui Mayor Richard Bissen at a ‘Lahaina Strong’ community gathering on Oct. 6, 2023, in Lahaina, Hawaii. Community members painted signs expressing their opposition to the October 8th start of tourists returning to west Maui following a devastating wildfire. The wind-whipped wildfire on August 8th killed at least 98 people while displacing thousands more and destroying over 2,000 buildings in the historic town, most of which were homes. A phased reopening of tourist resort areas in west Maui is set to begin Oct. 8 on the two-month anniversary of the deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history. Many local residents feel that the community needs more time to grieve and heal before reopening to tourism. (Mario Tama/Getty Images/TNS)

::

Among locals, there is no shortage of aloha.

In the days after the fire, as little aid came from the government, Lahaina schoolteachers, surfers, lifeguards, bartenders, roofers and carpenters rallied to help their neighbors.

They hauled in water, gas, air purifiers and respirators in boats, trucks and dugout canoes. They set up a network of relief hubs in parks and front yards offering displaced residents fresh water, cans of Spam, and bags of rice, diapers and medicine. They provided massages and acupuncture and story time for kids.

Local fishermen hauled in blue striped snapper from the sea, hunters caught wild boar in the mountains. Cooks fried up the fish and roasted pork for their neighbors.

The bonds between islanders, Naiwi Teruya said, had gotten closer.

“I don’t want to serve everyone who has everything,” Teruya said after finishing a shift frying fish at a distribution hub at Honokōwai Beach Park. “I would much rather take care of people suffering.”

Still, even though Teruya preferred that West Maui remained shuttered to tourists, he said he would keep on giving aloha to everyone.

“We have a sacred aloha,” he said. “We say it because no matter how down we are, we can still deliver the greeting and the feeling behind it, because we’re not a weak people.”

The word sets the tone, Teruya said, and it reminds people, even strangers, that they’re part of a community.

“The word ‘aloha’ is not just this thing you do because your job tells you to do it,” he said. “It’s our way of saying, ‘I can see you, you’re a person. And I’m also a person.’ “

©2023 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Abortion coverage is limited or unavailable at a quarter of large workplaces

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By Rachana Pradhan, KFF Health News

About a quarter of large U.S. employers heavily restrict coverage of legal abortions or don’t cover them at all under health plans for their workers, according to the latest employer health benefits survey by KFF.

The findings demonstrate another realm, beyond state laws, in which access to abortion care varies widely across America since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

More than ever, where someone works and the constraints of their health insurance can determine whether an abortion is possible. Workers without coverage are left to pay out-of-pocket for abortion care and related costs.

In 2021, the median costs for people paying out-of-pocket in the first trimester were $568 for a medication abortion and $625 for an abortion procedure, according to a report from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California-San Francisco. By the second trimester, the cost increased to $775 for abortion procedures.

KFF’s 2023 annual survey found that 10% of large employers — defined as those with at least 200 workers — don’t cover legal abortion care under their largest job-based health plan. An additional 18% said legal abortions are covered only in limited circumstances, such as when a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or endangers a person’s life or health.

The share of employers that said they don’t cover abortion under any circumstances “is bigger than I would have expected,” said Matthew Rae, an associate director at KFF who helped conduct the survey.

So far, 14 states, mostly in the South and Midwest, have enacted near-total abortion bans, and an additional seven states have instituted gestational limits between six and 18 weeks. Abortion is legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia.

Sharply divergent state abortion laws solidified in the aftermath of the Dobbs decision compound the complexity for employers with workers across multiple states, Rae said. Many large companies employ people in places with vastly different abortion policies, and their health benefits are more likely to cover dependents who may live elsewhere.

“Those dependents can be college kids — and college kids can be anywhere — or any other type of dependent who could just spread out over an area much larger than where you just have actual physical establishments,” Rae said.

The KFF survey found that about a third of large companies said they cover legal abortions in most or all circumstances; the largest companies, with at least 5,000 employees, were more likely to offer the benefit compared with smaller firms. An additional 40% said they were unsure of their coverage — perhaps because employer policies are in flux, Rae said.

Employer health plans’ treatment of abortion has changed little since the Dobbs decision, the survey found. Among companies that said they did not cover legally provided abortion services or covered them in limited circumstances, 3% reduced or eliminated abortion coverage. By contrast, of the large companies that generally covered abortion, 12% added or significantly expanded coverage.

That’s in sharp contrast to the rapidly changing laws governing abortion access in the states. It’s unclear whether workers at companies that don’t cover abortion or heavily restrict coverage are located primarily in states that have outlawed the procedure.

The KFF survey includes information from more than 2,100 large and small companies on their health benefits and the related costs for workers. Annual premiums for family coverage rose 7% on average this year, to $23,968, with employees on average contributing $6,575 toward that cost. The jump in premiums represents a notable increase compared with that of the previous year, when there was virtually no growth in those costs. Average yearly deductibles for workers were $1,735 for single coverage, a cost that was relatively unchanged.

One tactic employers use is to provide separate benefits for abortion-related expenses. In response to increasingly restrictive state abortion laws and the Supreme Court’s decision, large companies — such as Amazon, Starbucks, Disney, Meta, and JPMorgan Chase, among others — announced they would pay for employees’ abortion-related travel expenses.

However, the KFF survey found that a small share of large employers said they provide or plan to provide workers with financial help to cover abortion-related travel expenses. Companies with at least 5,000 workers are the most likely to provide that assistance. Overall, 7% of large employers said they provide or plan to provide financial assistance to employees who must travel out of state for abortion care.

According to the Brigid Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that helps people with logistics and defrays abortion-related costs, average travel costs now exceed $2,300. As restrictive laws proliferate, distances traveled have also increased since the Dobbs ruling, with each person on average traveling roughly 1,300 miles round trip in the first half of 2023.

Recent research published by job-search firm Indeed, the Institute of Labor Economics, and academics from the University of Southern California and the University of Maryland found that employers that announced abortion-related travel benefits saw an 8% increase in clicks on their job postings compared with similar jobs at comparable employers that did not announce such a policy.

However, job satisfaction among existing employees also dropped at those companies, with ratings of senior management dropping “8%, driven by workers in typically male-dominated jobs,” they wrote, “illustrating both the potential perks and pitfalls for companies that choose to wade into contentious political waters.”

KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News (KHN), is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.

©2023 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.