Why are there so few doctors in rural America?

There are about 6,000 federally designated areas with a shortage of primary care doctors in the U.S., and 4,000 with a shortage of dentists. Rural areas have about 68 primary care doctors per 100,000 people, compared with 84 in urban centers. Put another way, about a fifth of Americans live in rural areas, but barely a tenth of physicians practice there. A few stopgap measures have aimed to fix the problem, at least temporarily. The National Health Service Corps offers scholarships to students who train as primary care doctors, as long as they agree to serve for a year in a designated shortage area. medicine.