This isn't entirely true, but hopefully the point underlying this will be clear. The more you understand about human medicine, the less "confident," so to speak, you become about how "clear cut" certain things can be. As a layman, your understanding of medicine is pretty much zilch, thus clueless people make absolutely absurd claims regarding medical care, what they perceive to be "malpractice," etc. with misplaced confidence, totally unaware of how ridiculous they sound to actual physicians or healthcare professionals. The reason for this is because a lack of knowledge translates to a lack of possibility: you don't know enough to truly consider all the possibilities nor how to work up those possibilities.
Derm (and I'm sure @DermViser will agree with me here) is a prime example. If you know nothing about derm, then you perceive a visit to a dermatologist as "wtf they charged me $x and they looked at my skin for 5 minutes, those guys aren't real doctors!!!!1111" The reality, though, is that the differential diagnosis for most derm conditions is quite broad and include a number of conditions that you have likely never heard of and the subtleties of which most would fail to understand. Yet a degree of knowledge and expertise of just what is possible complicates problems significantly. Problems that were once "obvious" become less so, because you understand that several different things can superficially appear very similar. The job of a doctor is to understand these subtleties and develop the experience and expertise to differentiate among them.
This, in my view, is what is absolutely laughable about PAs, NPs, etc. claiming "they do everything a doctor does" and assert that they "know as much as a PCP." They hold this view because their knowledge is relatively limited and, consequently, they don't know about much less think about all of the possibilities that come with any presenting problem. Ignorance leads to arrogance. I just can't take any of those claims - like those made in the OP - seriously anymore. That's not to say that those providers don't have a place in our healthcare system or that they're stupid or otherwise incompetent. However, they don't even know what they don't know, and when you put that kind of person in charge of taking care of someone, the potential for danger arises. Sure, in 95% of cases the diagnosis just might be "clear cut," but what about that other 5%? What about the woman who presents with what appears to be eczema or an inflammatory lesion on the breast and is treated as such without any consideration that the actual cause might be a cancer? What happens when a condition that presents with vague findings isn't taken seriously and not properly investigated because the provider didn't think to look for something less obvious?
This is both the problem with giving independent practice rights to less rigorously trained providers and why it is difficult to demonstrate that the care is substandard. Most of the time, they'll be right. But do you want to be the person they get wrong? I certainly don't. But once again, making this point cogently to the lay public and to lawmakers responsible for regulating scope of practice is extremely difficult. Those of you who find yourselves in medical school one day will understand this later on in your training. It's a difficult point to accept or believe until you get yourself into the process to see just how complicated "basic" medicine can become.
