[cguess]

Incentives. Plenty of people would go into rural medicine if it wasn't paying crap and dealing with nothing but elderly Medicare patients because of the lack of health insurance for people just marginally above the Medicaid line. Of course this means there's basically no support currently for the hospitals and more than half are being bought up by private equity anyways and shipping it all to the smallest bottom line.

Congress can do a lot.

[BurningFrog]

Since the supply of doctors is limited, spending more money on them only increases doctor pay, not the number of doctors.