Physician: PAs and NPs are Minor League Providers
In an Erie (Pa.) Times-News roundtable discussion about health care, physician Brad Fox compares PAs and NPs to minor league baseball players:
The Senate (plan) is a lot of wishing. For them to stock the clinics they want, they have to expand the scope of practice of ... secondary providers. You'll have nurse practitioners and physician assistants staffing clinics with insufficient oversight. You'll find the standard and quality of care will decrease. You'll have more access to lesser quality care. You'll have a Triple-A team on the field when you want a major league team.
Fox is the president of the Pennsylvania Academy of Family Physicians.
With teammates like that, who needs opponents?
In the same roundtable, physician Carlo DiMarco suggests using NPs for blood-pressure screenings.
Carlo DiMarco, D.O.: It's not clear at all how the physicians would be covered with this extra cost. ... The whole system is broken. You get punished for having more patient encounters.
One response is that we can use nurse practitioners to do things like blood-pressure screenings, but they have to bill, and that gets forgotten.
Blood-pressure screenings?
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