Guinea

Yeah, you're just so open-minded and not arrogant about your abilities that you think NPs are better than MDs. And what do you think residency is? A classroom setting? Why do you think residents work 30 hour shifts? How many patients do you think medical students on clerkships follow at a time? Are there great NPs with decades of experience who are wonderful assets to the team? Absolutely. But you're kidding yourself if you think the plethora of recent online NP programs and direct entry NP programs are even remotely equivalent to the MD-residency combination, let alone superior. NP graduates from these newer programs today are nowhere in the same league as the previous generation of critical care nurses who went to NP programs after a decade of experience. Yet they have the audacity to feel superior to those MSNs because they took a couple fluff classes in elementary statistics and have a degree with the word Doctorate in it. And BTW, I think Illinois just made it illegal for DNPs to call themselves Doctors in the clinical setting.

No, her numbers were right. Texas public med school tuitions are pretty low, about $16,000 a year, and you typically get a little bit of grant money too. It's the living expenses that increase the final debt.

This is mostly false. It's only true in very specific cases and diseases investigated by the studies. You are essentially saying that primary care physicians are fools for going through so much more education and training (something like a minimum of 15,000 clinical hours versus a minimum of 1,500-3,000). This kind of BS is not going to help your relations with physicians, whom you will be working with on a frequent basis. Anyone with a modicum of common sense will realize that those extra years of education and training that a physician has will have a positive impact to care that may not be captured by the limited and flawed studies you cite. Even if you personally are the best and most competent nurse practitioner in the world, others studying to be NPs may severely fall through the cracks at a higher rate than that of physicians, given the shorter duration of training and fewer repetitive drilling especially in the direct entry NP programs. See for instance the anxiety in this thread of not passing the DNP certification exams on the first try, something that 95% of US medical students pass with harder exams.

That seems hard to believe though. Aren't they essentially primary care providers with prescription rights in most states? With the shortage in primary care physicians, wouldn't it be pretty easy finding a job as an FNP? Even if you take only Medicare patients, you would still make a decent salary at least compared to the RN.

So what's the difference between an FNP and an MD in family medicine? Nothing? I'm sorry, I find that hard to believe.

Why bother with a DNP? Why not go to medical school? It's almost the same length. The fourth year of medical school is mostly for interviewing. The NP made sense for veteran nurses looking to expand their scope. The BSN-DNP track doesn't really make much sense.

How's the situation for NPs without experience (those who went straight from BSN to MSN programs)? They're essentially cheaper family docs right? Are they immune to the glut?

How about this as a compromise? Everyone else can call themselves doctors, and those with MDs can call themselves medical doctors. Your relevant terminal clinical degree is printed with big letters (MD, DPN, DPT, PharmD) next to your ID badge so patients can easily identify what your doctorate is. No obfuscation, no BS. Good?