Doctors warn New Medical School guidance would lead to unqualified physicians and unscientific medicine

Bullet_Proof wrote:

Honest question: could you elaborate please?

I am curious why healthcare is so expensive compared to 40-50 years ago. For example, I never hear my parents or parents friends complain about how expensive healthcare was in the 70s 80s. Yet they had the same type of operations.

An appendectomy for example. They had appendectomys done all the time back then. The cost was minimal. Now I had an appendectomy and it cost $21,000. Insurance paid most of it - $18k - but I still had to pay $5000. That in my opinion is a lot of money.

Should an appendectomy cost $21,000?

Why are doctors salaries so high?

Liberals destroyed health care by trying to "fix" it and it make more "fair". They did the same thing to college education. Injecting government into anything ALWAYS makes it worse.

40-50 years ago you couldn't charge an 18 year old with no collateral $50,000 for college because 99.9% of the kids simply couldn't afford it An 18 year old kid couldn't get a loan for $50,000. Now liberals have made it so the federal government will back the loans for the kid and now the schools can charge the kid $250,000. And it is even more "equitable" now as you don't even have to be remotely qualified to go to college. With the government on the hook for all of the loans the schools have no problem at all signing up anyone whether they have any chance at all of actually completing a degree.

Liberals did the same thing with mortgages.... Why should home loans be given out based on credit score and ability to pay back the loan instead of skin color? Suddenly, anyone can get a loan, a housing bubble is created and then bursts when the banks figure out that people who are terrible with money are, in fact, still terrible with money when you give them a mortgage.

FDR and Truman destroyed healthcare. Prior to World War 2 pretty much no one had health insurance. By 1960 2/3's of Americans had employer based health insurance which is an absolute disaster. Throw in a giant inefficient government program like Medicare setting the rates for all of the private insurance companies and you've got $21,000 appendectomies. For almost every procedure – from routine checkups to heart transplants – Medicare sets what it considers a “fair price” for services rendered. And because of its enormous size, Medicare’s rates have a significant impact on what other insurers pay as well.

Whine much?

It's pretty silly to pretend the races are all physiologically identical...

Somebody skipped out on the first day of their intern year. Don't f*ck with an ICU nurse.

PA here with 15+ years of ER experience. I read the original article posted. Nothing about it was PAvsNPvsPhysician related, but I understand the tangent.

I’m pretty good at what I do in my defined role. Several accolades from patient satisfaction to cost-effective care.

One thing I know is that I am not an MD or DO. I am acutely and humbly aware of this difference. We practice medicine under the supervision of a physician. That is the essence of our profession. My scientific knowledge and skill set is not level with my ER physician colleagues.

Nobody was making these comparisons 20 years ago. Now we have NPs who are ‘docs’ and PAs changing their name from ‘assistant’ to ‘associate.’

I make it a policy to not see doctors but if I had to, I want the doctor who passed his MCAT's.

It's been happening for years.

Low low wrote:

Standards in public schools have been going down for years.

Ain't this the truth, the average US born citizen in America don't even know what year this country declared independence.

Camden county wrote:

eoter wrote:

It's 2021 - knuckle-draggers don't believe in scientific expertise of doctors anymore anyway. They already claim they are unqualified.

Which ones, the ones that frequent Fox News or the ones that frequent CNN?

Idk which ones don't believe in science?

sad. wrote:

Low low wrote:

Standards in public schools have been going down for years.

Ain't this the truth, the average US born citizen in America don't even know what year this country declared independence.

And that matters why?

lol, this ain't reddit where the hive mind can simply downvote the opinion that is counter to your narrative. there is no difference between MD/PA/NP/CRNA in terms of quality of care or clinical outcomes. The titles are vestigial and obsolete. Thanks for playing. You will continue to see trends move away from physicians as it becomes more woke. Working at level 1s, I am seeing physicians who are vaaaaaaastly unqualified.

It should be known here that med school admission is stupid hard.

Admissions rates of 1-3% are common.

You get through that (unless you get an affirmative action boost) and then you pass all the qualifying tests and you are a heck of a person,

Qualification wise.

It's not that I'd expect NPs and PAs to have better outcomes in all cases IF all other criteria were equal. But the thing is, they might not be equal.

We've got a shortage of doctors. Adding a bunch more NPs and PAs and such to the list would free the docs to concentrate more on challenging individual cases instead of being swamped, and the NPs and PAs themselves would be able to spend more time on the patients coming in for routine maintenance and cases that present in the standard ways.

It's not "their," it's "they're..."

The pandemic has exposed the medical profession in the US to be dominated by racist physicians, nurses and administrators.

agsed wrote:

Yes, this is bad.

What is worse is the explosion of online nurse practitioner schools. These nurse practitioners are commonly misidentified as doctors and provide independent (and sub-par) care to patients.

Both need to be fixed, but I'd argue that the NP fiasco is more pressing.

As a primary care NP with 18 years in the field, I’d say this comment is right on the mark. And many other NPs are concerned as well, how can we expect respect from patients and colleagues if you can buy a degree on Amazon? Unfortunately our governing association (AANP) values high membership over quality, and it’s partners in big pharma like innocent, easily bribed prescribers.

Bullet_Proof wrote:

Why are doctors salaries so high?

When adjusted for inflation; physician salaries have decreased since the early 90s.

Del Preston wrote:

lol, this ain't reddit where the hive mind can simply downvote the opinion that is counter to your narrative. there is no difference between MD/PA/NP/CRNA in terms of quality of care or clinical outcomes. The titles are vestigial and obsolete. Thanks for playing. You will continue to see trends move away from physicians as it becomes more woke. Working at level 1s, I am seeing physicians who are vaaaaaaastly unqualified.

Del, are you sure the "physicians" you are seeing aren't actually NP/PA/CRNA/etc? There absolutely is a difference in quality of care. Go read the studies I linked on page 2 of this thread.

Signed, your friendly PulmCrit Attending.

agsed wrote:

seriously tho wrote:

AMA historically fights anything that would increase the supply of doctors because then you wouldn't make 300k doing what PAs consistently do just as well.

(They had ONE instance of saying the opposite thing, halfheartedly, once.)

Lol - PAs do not do the same things as doctors do "just as well".

Absolutely true. I had a PA completely misdiagnose me. She didn’t order the proper diagnostic tests, (X-ray, MRI) wouldn’t listen to me describe my symptoms or do a proper checkup. My pain was 9 on a Level of 1-10. She said I had a muscle strain when even I knew it was a herniated disc. Cracker Jack degree. I pay enough money to see a Doctor not a glorified nurse.