Your response reads like an essay for being admitted to medical school, full of idealism and not much real world experience. That's not a knock on you. It's just what you've experienced up to this point in your life. Of course, no matter what healthcare group you belong to, the patient's well-being takes precedence over any turf battles and we need to work together as a team to make it happen. That is not being debated. What we are debating though is how that team should ideally be composed. Fastforward yourself 7 years from now when you're finishing your family medicine residency. For taking on $250k in debt and spending 7 years of some of the best years of your life, you, or at least most people, would expect a good job with good security and pay waiting for you. You've made a huge investment after all! What if that is no longer the case? What if you have a difficult time finding a job because hospitals now prefer to staff with NP's and PA's for primary care? Or, the hospital will hire you, but you get paid not much more than the PA or NP who only went through 2 years of post-undergrad schooling (and hence less debt) while you spent 7 years. Or, your job is not that secure anymore because primary care practitioners are a dime a dozen? Wouldn't you feel foolish for becoming a doc when you could have just become a PA or NP to basically do the same job while having less debt and not wasting those extra years? This scenario is not as far-fetched as it may sound. It happens when you suddenly increase the supply of professionals who can do the same job and as a result the supply and demand curve is shifted. I can't predict when the scenario will come to fruition, but the laws of economics make no special exception just because you're a doctor. I've already seen it happen in other industries. Over the past decade, companies have been very aggressive in outsourcing work to other countries or importing workers into this country. These globalization trends have a negative impact on US workers because whereas before you were competing against the guy down the street you are now competing against the guy on the other side of the world and he's willing to work for less than McDonald's wages. How do you compete against that? You can't. While medical organizations closely regulate the number of doctors produced to keep the salaries high, do the nursing groups do the same? I doubt it. They'll just keep pumping out more of these PA's and NP's as long as people are willing to enroll and pay the tuition. In the time it takes to produce 1 primary care doc, 3.5 PA's and NP's are made. Why do you suppose that there are so many freaking law and business schools in this country? Because most of the schools are just after the tuition money. Only the grads from the top programs get the top jobs while most others eek out a very average living. Is that what you want to happen to medicine?
I won't comment on the quality of care as others have already. I assume that someone who has at least 7 years of training and passed umpteen tests can provide higher quality of care than someone with only 2 years.
Let me see. New poster who comes on a forum for medical students who claims that NP's are just as good as MD's. I think I smells a troll. 
