[tptacek]

A Hanson suggestion from that post: bring in practitioners from places with a low-cost standard of care so they can impose those practices on American medicine.

I'm a broken record, but: that's another benefit of nurse practitioners. They aren't equipped to prescribe exotic, unproven, or advanced medications; instead, they're equipped to provide an 80%-solution standard of care and to recognize when to escalate past that. If NP's were the normal first tier of care for most patients, we'd get better resource allocation simply by eliminating an opportunity for carelessly wasteful decisions from overworked doctors.

[nazgulnarsil]

this is the wal-mart/CVS solution which Hanson is a big fan of as well.