- August 27, 2026
- Credentialing
Physicians born outside the U.S. have always played an integral role in American healthcare, keeping our healthcare sector functioning, driving innovation, and ensuring patients have access to care. In fact, foreign-born doctors are older than America itself, with England’s Dr. Thomas Wotton as the first documented physician arriving in Virginia in April 1607.
Today, nearly 1 in 4 doctors in the U.S. are foreign medical graduates and internal medicine physicians who were not born in the U.S., and they treated 22 million Medicare beneficiaries in 2024. An article last year in the Harvard Gazette said it well: “Foreign doctors have become the invisible foundation of American medicine.”
Yet recent policy shifts may be making it more difficult for physicians born outside the U.S. to provide care in America.
What will we lose with a reduction in foreign-born physicians? According to a recent article in MedPage Today, “more patients treated by doctors born abroad were Black (9.5% vs. 7%), Latino (6.6% vs. 3.9%), dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid (20.9% vs. 11.7%), and living in high-poverty zip codes (19.8% vs. 15.9%),” they reported. Furthermore, Giacomo Meille, PhD, of the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) said, “We found that these foreign-born physicians are disproportionately helping to serve communities that have more difficulties accessing care.” As the sector grapples with the ongoing physician shortage, an aging physician workforce, and a growing population of baby boomers aging into Medicare, we need more physicians, not fewer.
And it’s not just delivering care to patients that may be affected, as physicians born outside of the U.S. have long played an important role in spurring critical innovation and research and holding top leadership roles within the sector.
So what can we do outside of policy changes? Making medical school more accessible and affordable would help grow the domestic physician supply, but that takes years, not months. There’s already momentum: Dozens of new medical schools have opened in the past 25 years, and earlier this year several more announced plans to open. The bigger challenge now is affordability, not supply. Building more schools doesn’t help if the cost keeps qualified students out.
Additionally, prioritizing provider credentialing is essential to ensure that providers can see patients when and where they are needed. This includes standardizing credentialing across states and governing boards. As it stands, most states require physicians to be separately licensed in every state in which they practice, whether they are a U.S. citizen or not, creating long delays for providers. With so many obstacles potentially bottlenecking access to care for patients and creating more hoops for physicians, modernizing credentialing is one less hurdle to be crossed. Providers don’t need more headaches; they need better processes in place that make it seamless for them to practice medicine, rather than add to the challenges they are already facing.
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