Victim-blaming and the "looping" effect of social policy: the cause of physician maldistribution and underserved rural communities.

Ryan's (1971) description of the ideology of "victim-blaming" is briefly reviewed. It is then shown how this strategy for obscuring the causes of a social problem is used against rural, medically underserved communities by health care provider and planning interest groups to "explain" critical shortages of physicians in their areas. In addition to lending further support for the existence of this ideology, a "looping" effect of social policy designed to deal with physician maldistribution is identified. It is argued that this can be viewed as analytically distinct from the ideology itself and that it serves the purpose of further obscuring the larger structural sources of the social problem.