Rural Medicine—Making It Now,and the Problems Ahead

King City, California, a small remote town among thousands in the nation, has demonstrated that private physicians and federal funds can jointly develop effective health care delivery mechanisms to serve residents of all incomes with a full complement of hospital and outpatient services as well as community health programs. Young health care professionals can be drawn to the traditionally difficult-to-serve rural areas. Unanswered is the problem of developing and maintaining an adequate funding base for health services in rural communities in the face of a disproportionately large number of poor people with a sub-optimal job future. The dollar resources in the rural community are often simply inadequate to buy needed health and social services.