It is unlikely that it gets deprecated here. It's used for too many things. For instance one part of the free healthcare you get is a local doctor usually a few blocks from where you live where you can go for basic needs. This is also assigned based on your current address.
This also used to be the case in Poland. Now you can choose the GP you go to and change that decision IIRC twice a year. Choosing a doctor that's far away makes no sense, so there's no or little reason to restrict that choice to close doctors.