Kentucky has a shortage of doctors and nurses.

You've heard this time and time again this morning.

And Frankfort lawmakers heard from experts in rural health care about those shortages and how they're affecting small communities across the state.

When we look at the state of Kentucky, we have over 10,000 physicians practicing in Turkey.

And I broke this out by rural, urban, Delta and Appalachia just to show you the percentage of physicians we have providing care in the state of Kentucky.

And if you notice, the biggest number of physicians are located in urban Kentucky.

A physician in that first one in urban would say 1 to 3331 patients with the ratio of 1 to 1500.

When you drop down to Appalachia, you look at a physician has to see more patients at 1800 patients.

And so it is more of a burden when you have less physicians providing services for the people in those counties.

The Kentucky Office of Rural Health oversees a loan relief program for graduates who work in regions of the state most impacted by health care professional shortages.

State Senator Stephen Merideth, a Republican from Litchfield who chairs the Senate Health Services Committee, said he wants to see more done to address the shortage.

Quite literally, we're spitting in the ocean.

It's in quite concern.

We're not being aggressive enough with this.

And I don't know what the challenge is has going to be addressed.

40% of our population, rural, but only 25% of our primary care physicians are there.

Why do you think that is?

Why is there such a disparity in rural and urban?

I think a lot of that is to do with pay.

You know, you come to a rural area and the pay is not the same for physicians.

When you look at that, just in my opinion, of being in health care, the years that I was working there has a lot to do with it.

And then a lot of the amenities that are around in rural that you have access to Housing is a big issue.

Daycare, school, you know, there's there's all kinds of issues there.

Health care professionals working in private practices do not qualify for the loan relief program because of federal regulations.