PAs provide an instructive example, but there are many others of different sorts. Often, PA schools have stricter prerequisite experience requirements, and PA students often take the bulk of their courses with the MD students, and have maybe a semester less of courses, before clinical training. So the end effect is that a PA's actual experience is often the comparable to an MD's after a couple of years of practice. Hospitals and health care systems know this, and have been gradually replacing MDs in many areas with PAs because they're cheaper but provide similar care.

We can't afford to maintain this fiction that the only way to have something skillfully done is by the MD training model.