There's a lot of confusion happening in this thread. I'm by no means an expert on the issue, but I think it's important to define the term "provider" so that people are no longer arguing past each other, so to speak.
Provider status simply means that payers (private insurance companies, Medicaid, Medicare, etc.) recognize a profession's services as valuable and are willing to reimburse said professionals for conducting them. Note: it does not mean that all providers are equal. The services provided by providers are limited to those legally outlined in state practice acts. Ex. Insurance Company A is willing to pay a pharmacist to conduct a comprehensive medication review for my grandmother. My grandmother meets with a pharmacist, chats for a while about how her medications are working for her, what's she's taking, her concerns, etc., and the pharmacist writes to and/or calls her prescribers with his or her findings. In the eyes of Insurance Company A, pharmacists are providers. Does this have anything to do with physical assessment, diagnosis, prescriptive authority, or the like? No, no it doesn't.
Being a provider does NOT mean that one is capable of examining, diagnosing and managing a patient independently. That, instead, is the definition of what it means to be a physician, PA, NP, dentist, etc. What a provider is legally able to do is defined by state practice acts, and these are a topic for a different discussion.
So, to sum up, provider does not = physician, mid level, prescriber, diagnostician, etc. It is a designation for a professional who provides a valuable (read: reimbursable) service in the eyes of payers (not limited to physical assessment, diagnosis, prescriptive authority--remember, these are a separate topic, defined by state practice acts). Pharmacists and physicians can both be providers for doing the different jobs they have been trained to do.
