The Reasonableness of Physician Assistants

Physician assistants, or physician associates (PAs) as many prefer to be called, have treated me in my local in-network urgent care center for years in person or via telemedicine visits and occasionally in my primary care physician’s practice when my PCP wasn’t available for a previously scheduled appointment.

Guess what? I’m still here.

They didn’t order the wrong tests. They didn’t misdiagnose me. They didn’t prescribe the wrong drug. In two cases, they appropriately referred me to the hospital emergency department for further evaluation. They didn’t harm me in any way.

I like PAs as much as I like nurse practitioners. NPs also do a great job when my PCP or even one of my medical specialists isn’t available.

You know who doesn’t like PAs and NPs? Organized medicine led by the American Medical Association (AMA). It views PAs and NPs as encroaching on their clinical and financial turf. The AMA has an ongoing campaign against what it calls “scope creep.”

The AMA’s guild mentality aside, the use of PAs and NPs is one way the healthcare industry is filling the gap between the supply of PCPs and the demand for primary care services. We talked about that in the Nov. 6, 2025, episode of our 4sight Health Roundup podcast, “More Primary Care, Please.”

That’s why a new report published last week by Wolters Kluwer caught my eye. It’s a report on what PAs think about everything and everyone else. The 10-page report, “Future forecast: The growing impact of PAs in healthcare,” is based on a survey of 203 PAs conducted in September.

Here are a few interesting results from the survey:

• 43% said patients understand the differences between a PA, an NP and a medical doctor (M.D.).
• 47% said patients’ knowledge of the differences is superficial and suffers from a lack of clarity.
• 45% said they’d prefer to be called physician associates, not physician assistants.
• 77% said they have a great deal of autonomy in how they practice.
• 97% said they are satisfied with their ability to practice at the top of their license.
• 56% said they are using AI-powered technology every day with the most common use (61%) being for clinical documentation in electronic health records systems.

Those results are interesting to me because they’re reasonable. They’re not asking to be doctors. They’re not asking to perform surgery. They’re not asking to be unsupervised. They seem to just want to do what they’ve been trained to do — no more, no less — and they like what they do. At least according to this survey.

What’s the AMA and organized medicine so worried about? Oh, right. Money.

Build a better healthcare system.