Medical licensure

While it is not a governmental agency, the [American Medical] Association has maintained a lively interest in legislation bearing upon medical education, especially the organization of state licensing boards and the passage of basic science requirements as a prerequisite for medical school attendance and licensure.... the real beneficiary of this extensive activity is the patient (Bauer, 1965, pp. 308–310).

For decades it [the American Medical Association] kept down the number of physicians, kept up the costs of medical care, and prevented competition with “duly apprenticed and sworn” physicians by people from outside the profession—all, of course, in the name of helping the patient.... It is clear that licensure is the key to the medical profession's ability to restrict the number of physicians who practice medicine. It is also the key to its ability to restrict technological and organizational changes in the way medicine is conducted (Friedman and Friedman, 1981, p. 221; Friedman, 1962, p. 154).

Abstract

Society has granted considerable regulatory powers to physician-dominated licensing boards. While achieving the social benefit of protecting the consumer by maintaining minimum standards for entry into the profession, the licensure mechanism has also resulted in substantial social costs. Excessive restriction on entry into the profession has occurred; difficulty in developing innovations in the distribution of medical care have resulted; and severe limitations on the activities of nonmedical health practitioners who pose a competitive threat to the physician have taken place. To reduce these social costs, the licensing mechanism should be reconstructed with physicians serving in advisory, not policy-making, positions.