Community-structure constraints on distribution of physicians.

The distribution of physicians in the United States by county is compared by regression analysis with that of other professional and technical personnel to demonstrate that this is one aspect of a macrosocioeconomic process tending to favor those communities which have more social and economic advantages. Several programs proposing to modify this distribution are discussed, and it is concluded that such efforts, insofar as they fail to focus on the community structure underlying differential distribution, are unlikely to affect existing trends, and that organizational changes in the medical care system based on the establishment of intercommunity networks would have a greater chance of modifying distributional inequities.