Doctors, pilots and other genuinely essential professions are well covered by a number of other visa categories, such as EB-2.

I don't think the EB-2 process allows the applicant to stay within the US while waiting for the priority date to become current so staying in the US and working during that 3-12 year period won't work without another visa type.

Rural hospitals are lucky to have any doctor on staff let alone a cardiologist. They are mostly staffed by nurses for quick patch-up work and life flights to major medical centers.

H1B doesn't solve the problem of poor communities getting poor healthcare. Frankly, it costs too much to become a doctor which limits where doctors can be employed. Plenty would like to work rural, but not with $500,000 in student loans. And no, that's no joke. I have a nephew going to medical school in Idaho and that's what his loans are.

A serious problem should not be treated with a band-aid and if you think a band-aid is ok do not be surprised the problem gets worse.

Part of the shortage is also because very few people can afford to become doctors.

In many cases, the rebalancing that is needed is from subspecialties to community based primary care in rural and other underserved areas. Some new medical schools appeared in the 1970’s to address the need for more family medicine docs. What happened was completely predictable… more subspecialists. Graduates follow the money trail when choosing residencies and fellowships.

Don't post docs usually come over on J-1s (if they aren't using practical training)?

"My rural patients are so much more insufferable than my urban ones"

https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1nkb8f9/my_rural_...

It seems that the reasons for missing doctors are... complex.

I retired from medicine, having spent my career at a well-known institution in the upper midwest of the U.S. Over the course of my tenure there, I took care of patients from all parts of the world, all walks of life. Some of my most cherished patients hailed from rural farm communities. Whatever that commenter’s issues might be, this doesn’t line up with my experience at all. The work of the physician is to tailor their work to meet the needs of the patient by understanding their needs in ways that may be difficult to discern through ways other than empathic understanding.

There was no prediction or conclusion made whatsoever, it was a number of for the Internet quite high quality personal observations. If you are unable or unwilling to accept the personal observations of those people, here doctors, then the issue is on your side.

We also know that there indeed is a significant difference in culture, we can see that in elections and elsewhere. That too is a "known bias", which you also ignore.

For example:

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/the-electoral-coll...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07430...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban%E2%80%93rural_political_...

So differences in general are real, and you cannot simply dismiss any anecdotes as "bias", especially since there never was a claim for that thread to be anything more than that.

This divide is also not the same all over the globe, the US may be more extreme (example: https://www.uva.nl/shared-content/uva/en/news/news/2024/03/t... -- "Compared to the US, UK and Canada, overall levels of urban-rural electoral divides are still substantially lower in most European countries, due to centrist parties attracting support from both urban and rural areas."). That too has some interesting comments showing this in that thread, with the bad anecdotes coming mostly from US doctors.

So, if we're using the reddit thread you yourself have presented as evidence of the general sentiment on this topic, I think the parent commenter is correct in arguing that there is no particular universal trend here. These experiences probably have more to do with the simple randomness of where you work and what kind of personality you have.