Busting the AMA's Union Rules: A partial solution to health care costs?

As a pre-med who couldn't jump through the hoops necessary to get the 3.8 or so grade average minimally necessary for admission to medical school, I firmly believe that the British system (in which a Bachelor of Medicine, four-year college graduate can perform most primary care treatment tasks) bears looking at.

You don't need four years undergrad schooling, four years medical school, a two year internship and a residency that can last several years to diagnose upper respiratory congestion and work down a differential diagnostic tree. One of the reasons National Health Service works in the UK is that the cost of educating and hiring physicians is much lower. There are MDs there, most of whom specialize in non-primary care.

I think that a little re-thinking and marketing is in order. Import the British Commonwealth's Bachelor of Medicine degree program, or adapt current nurse practitioner and physician assistant programs so that they are equivalent to the British basic physician level of competency (and for all I know, they may be already - the only English physician I ever consulted took three weeks to clear up an oropharyngeal infection that an American practitioner could have cleared up with a ten-day course of Keflex).

It's time to break up the AMA's union rules. They are part of the impasse we face. If becoming a practicing physician only took four to eight years and didn't require unrealistically high grades in a four-year undergrad program before medical training even began, medical care WOULD be less expensive. Certainly, if or when "health care reform" goes through, the flood of uninsured patients into the existing primary care physician pool will swamp available physician resources. We need more primary care practitioners.

And that is something I think that conservatives, liberals, libertarians and Tea Partiers could ALL get behind.