• Posted June 22, 2026

Federal Push To Increase U.S. Primary Care Docs Has Fizzled, Study Says

Federal efforts to expand the number of primary care doctors in America have fallen short, a new study says.

Primary care’s share of 1,000 new U.S. residency positions funded by Medicare has dwindled over time, researchers reported June 15 in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Overall, primary care positions increased by just 2% as a result of new laws passed in 2021 and 2023 to increase medical residencies in the United States.

By comparison, interventional radiology and psychiatry had the greatest overall increase in residency positions thanks to the laws, rising by 16% and 13%, researchers said.

They said these efforts also failed to draw doctors to America’s rural areas as intended.

“We found that new residency positions are not consistently reaching rural areas or supporting primary care as intended,” senior researcher Hao Yu said in a news release. Yu is an associate professor of population medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute in Boston.

Congress passed laws in 2021 and 2023 intended to expand the number of residency positions available to medical students, in response to a significant and growing shortage of primary care doctors, researchers said in background notes.

Among 1,000 residency positions created between 2023 and 2025, 800 were funded by the 2021 law and 200 through the 2023 law, researchers said.

The 2021 law created 200 positions in each of four separate rounds of funding, and the percentage of primary care positions decreased as these rounds progressed, results showed.

Primary care residencies accounted for 32% of those positions in the fourth round, a 22-percentage point decline from the first round, researchers found.

The 2021 law also reserved at least 10% of new residency positions for rural areas in America, a goal that the programs never met, researchers said.

In the first round, 6% of residencies were allocated to rural areas, but that fell to 3% by round four. Only 1% of positions created by the 2023 law went to rural areas.

“Expanding training slots alone is not enough. How programs distribute those slots matters for addressing physician shortages,” lead author Dr. Tarun Ramesh, a research fellow at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, said in a news release.

“Policymakers should strengthen requirements for primary care and rural medicine training to ensure that growth in the physician pipeline translates into care where it is most needed,” Ramesh said.

More information

The Association of American Medical Colleges has more about the U.S. physician shortage.

SOURCES: Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, news release, June 16, 2026; JAMA, June 15, 2026