Primary Care Physician Supply and the Medically Underserved

Abstract

QUALITY health care for all Americans has been viewed as an individual right rather than a privilege. Today, many Americans lack access to an ongoing source of primary care and, therefore, to essential clinical preventive services. Differences in health status between subsets of our population continue to be a national embarrassment.¹Providing equal access to primary health care has been a problem for this nation throughout its history. What is needed... is a body of information and general principles concerning man as a whole and man in society that will provide an intellectual framework into which the lessons of practical experience can be fitted. This background will be partly biologic, but partly it will be social and humanistic, for it will deal with man as a total complex, integrated, social being. Medical schools and teaching hospitals should prepare many more physicians than now exist who will have the desire