When was the last time you went to the doctor?
Not necessarily for something big, not for a broken finger or the flu. Just a checkup. A regular annual visit to make sure everything is ok with your health.
For about a third of Americans, it’s probably been too long. In 2024, more than 100 million people did not have a regular primary doctor at all, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.
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The numbers are sobering. More than 100 million Americans are estimated to lack a regular primary care provider, while the Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortage of as many as 40,400 primary care physicians by 2036. Those numbers are often presented as a workforce problem that we will eventually have to solve. From where I sit, however, this is not a future problem. It is already happening in doctors’ offices across the country. I see it every day.
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This data brief presents findings from the 2025 Commonwealth Fund International Health Policy Survey of Primary Care Physicians to examine care coordination in 10 countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We report on the types of clinicians coordinating care, the timeliness of care delivery, the information being exchanged between providers, and reported barriers to coordination. We also identify key lessons for how countries can improve care coordination.
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Sweden is aligning primary care access goals with physician workforce policy more explicitly. Rather than treating physician training as separate from care delivery, Sweden is using workforce policy as a tool to strengthen continuity, accessibility, and person-centered primary care. To support this goal, the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare analyzed primary care workload and physician capacity, established a benchmark of one primary care physician per 1,100 residents, and issued recommendations to guide regional workforce planning toward that target.
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On July 31, the PCC and its Better Health NOW Campaign submitted formal comments on the Interim Final Rule implementing Medicaid Community Engagement requirements, calling on CMS to “withdraw and reissue the IFR in a manner that is more consistent with Medicaid’s statutory aim and requirements.”
Read our letter below.
A new qualitative study published in The Annals of Family Medicine spotlights how day-to-day practice differs between U.S. primary care physicians working for health systems and those in independent settings. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 30 physicians, the researchers identified five recurring themes that capture the practical trade-offs behind the growing shift toward employed models of care.
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What happens when your town loses its only doctor? That is a situation you never want to consider, but unfortunately for residents of the Finger Lakes, we may likely find out.
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A Beech Island man says his father was dropped by his primary care doctor the day before a scheduled appointment — leaving him scrambling to find a new provider while running low on insulin.
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Less than three-quarters of the nation’s young adults have a primary care provider, a trend that researchers from the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center say could impair patient engagement and care coordination down the road.
According to a survey of just over 1,000 U.S. adults, only 71% of those aged 18-29 reported having a primary care provider. That’s compared to 97% of those over age 65 who said the same.
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The primary care relationship, long treated as a fixed feature of American medicine, is thinning on two fronts for the country’s youngest adults: They are less likely to have a physician, and even when they do, most are not walking through the door.
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