Depoliticizing Healthcare Licensure : Making Competence the New Standard for Licensing the Healthcare Workforce

The current system of healthcare licensure contributes to the high cost of and impaired access to medical care. Politics plays a perverse role in maintaining the status quo and prevents the healthcare workforce from adapting to the evolving needs and rapid technological advances of the 21st century. The authors propose a less politicized system modeled after the process for certification of airline pilots. (Pilots, like physicians, are professionals in a highly technical field; like physicians, their competence is a matter of health, safety, life, and death.) We believe such a system would evolve to rely on the demonstration of competence as the standard for licensure and we argue that this is not necessarily the case in the current system of physician licensure. Training programs for achieving specific, certifiable competencies are likely to be shorter and more modular than those currently available