NP or MD? Are we asking the wrong question

NP or MD? Are we asking the wrong question

One component of healthcare’s access problem is the relative scarcity of physicians, a gap nurse practitioners (NPs) have increasingly helped fill. Their lower salaries make substitution economically attractive, but evidence from VA emergency departments suggests that lower-cost clinicians do not necessarily produce lower-cost care. More surprisingly, individual clinician performance may matter considerably more than whether the clinician is an …