In the three decades immediately following World War II, American states struggled to solve its long-standing inequitable geographic distribution of medical resources and access to medical care. The 1946 Hospital Survey and Construction Act, better known as Hill-Burton, was intended to address the need for more hospitals in underserved areas, but by the early 1950s, some new rural hospitals were closing because of a lack of physicians to staff them. Even countries with provincial or national health care plans, such as Canada and the UK, faced difficulties getting physicians to locate in remote areas. As in earlier periods of reform, medical education was seen as the vehicle for changing practice, but now within the framework of a more comprehensive approach including a mix of financial incentives, regional planning, post-graduate medical education, and the revitalization of general practice. One of the best-known state plans, the Kansas Rural Health Plan, featured repeatedly in popular magazines at the time and became the model for a national plan endorsed by the National Farm Bureau in 1948. Its primary feature was an expansion of the state medical school, supplemented with encouragement to communities to subsidize appropriate “medical workshops” to attract physicians, and broadening continuing medical education to address rural general practitioners’ potential intellectual isolation. Other states, such as Kentucky and North Carolina, and the Commonwealth Fund established loan programs for medical students who took up rural practice, while Michigan promoted increased Blue Cross insurance participation in rural areas to allay physicians’ financial concerns. Some Canadian and US medical schools established rural student recruitment goals and voluntary and mandatory rural preceptorship programs, culminating in full-year rural clerkships in Minnesota and a consortium of western states by the early 1970s. However, the continuing shortage of medical personnel in rural areas contributed to national debates about medical workforce supply and the creation of new public medical schools with an emphasis on primary care in the US in the 1970s. A mix of constituencies with different motivations—health professional organizations, local communities, agricultural lobbies, government agencies, and medical education leaders—formulated a range of post-war approaches to providing doctors for underserved areas. All were voluntary and relatively ineffectual. The assumption of the necessity to preserve physician autonomy, and in the American context to fend off “socialized medicine,” undermined alternative models for rural medical education and practice, even as medical leaders worried that the inability to resolve rural disparities posed a significant threat to the existing system of medical education and care.