“Tens of millions of Americans live in communities where they cannot find a doctor while others have to wait months to be seen.”

Based on that measure, 100 million people in the United States live in a geographic area, are part of a targeted population, or are served by a health care facility where there is a shortage of primary care providers. If they all want doctors and cannot find them,

The metric is a meaningful way to measure the impact of primary care, experts said. In those areas, “you see life expectancies of up to a year less than in other areas,” said Russ Phillips, a physician who is director of Harvard Medical School’s Center for Primary Care. “The differences are critically important.”

Another way to think about primary care shortages is to evaluate the extent to which people report having a usual source of care, meaning a clinic or doctor’s office where they would go if they were sick or needed health care advice. By that measure, 27% of adults said they do not have such a location or person to rely on, or that they used the emergency room for that purpose in 2020, according to a primary care score card published by the Milbank Memorial Fund and the Physicians Foundation, which publish research on health care providers and the health care system.

The figure was notably lower in 2010 at nearly 24%, said Christopher Koller, president of the Milbank Memorial Fund. “And it’s happening when insurance is increasing, at the time of the Affordable Care Act.”

The U.S. had an adult population of roughly 258 million in 2020. Twenty-seven percent of 258 million reveals that about 70 million adults didn’t have a usual source of care that year

A survey by physician staffing company Merritt Hawkins found that it took an average of 20.6 days to get an appointment for a physical with a family physician in 2022. But that figure was 30% lower than the 29.3-day wait in 2017. Geography can make a big difference, however. In 2022, people waited an average of 44 days in Portland, Oregon, compared with eight days in Washington, D.C.