Renewed effort to lure doctors to rural areas faces obstacles

The Obama Administration recently invested more than $1 billion from the stimulus and the health-care law into the National Health Services Corps to beef up doctor recruitment. It's more money than the 40-year-old agency has ever had, said Rebecca Spitzgo, associate administrator for the Bureau of Clinician Recruitment and Service.

Nearly 5,000 recent medical school graduates accepted federal grants to pay off tuition and school loans averaging $150,000 per student. The awards come with contracts that obligate the young doctors to remain in what are typically rural areas for three to five years. The corps hopes to recruit another 2,800 students next year. A report by the corps' advisory council estimated that 27,000 primary care physicians are needed to meet the needs of about 45 million Americans in medically underserved areas. But several young doctors who were interviewed said they are struggling with whether to spend a career in rural settings. Experts said they expect retention to be a problem.

Some docs are unprepared for the daily inconveniences of rural living: well water in the clinic's kitchen sink that smells of rotten eggs; being unable to use the iPhone's Epocrates app, which helps doctors identify and prescribe medicine; the dial-up Internet that crawls along on a single computer shared by the clinic; the 40-minute drive to a grocery store; the lack of dating potential.