Policies of Correcting the Physician's Geographical Uneven Distribution in Japan

Japan has adopted the universal health care insurance system since 1961. It means that the government has to guarantee the access to health resources to the insured living everywhere in Japan. The other hand, Japanese physicians can practice medicine at their favorite place within Japan. This system has continued traditionally from the 19th century. Therefore, the government has not been able to adopt any policy to directly regulate the practice place of physicians. This presentation examines how the geographical distribution of physicians has changed in Japan under these circumstances. Concretely, it analyzes how the policies after the 1960s, namely the increase of medical schools in the 1970s, the regulation of hospital beds since the 1990s, the new clinical training system in the 2000s, have influenced the geographical distribution of physicians, and shows that the physician’s geographical uneven distribution has decreased.