Rebuttal: Congress, not the AANP, can resolve the physician shortage

Members of Physicians for Patient Protection respond to claims made by the American Association of Nurse Practitioners.

Featuring PPP members: Alyson Maloy, MD, Phil Shaffer, MD

“We read with fascination the response by American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP) president April Kapu, DNP, ARNP to the Medical Economics interview with Alyson Maloy, MD, of Physicians for Patient Protection (PPP) on the effect of Covid-19 on the physician shortage. Kapu’s letter was replete with the AANP’s familiar but unsubstantiated claims regarding the ability of nurse practitioners (NPs) to ameliorate the physician shortage. Since an entire, well-researched book on scope-of-practice issues was published in 2020,[i] our desire here is simply to correct factual errors in Kapu’s response. We quote each of Kapu’s main assertions in bold, provide rebuttals, and close with our own fail-safe solution to solving the physician shortage: Congressional approval of an increase in the number of residency positions to meet the population’s needs….”