Via Sullivan, this conservative suggestion for health care reform rang a few bells, as it might with any parent:

Absurdly restrictive licensing barriers to providing even rudimentary care make health care very, very expensive.  Any parent can tell you children’s ear infections are about as common as weekends.  And they’re about as hard to diagnose, too.  Yet, instead of just picking up the amoxicillin over the counter and giving it to the crying child (20 minutes, tops), parents have to spend a very substantial portion of a day trying to see the doctor (and kids never have ear infections during regular doctor’s hours) and getting a prescription filled.  That’s insane.  It doesn’t take a decade’s worth of medical training to diagnose an ear infection.  So let’s have a more graduated licensing system, with vocational schools teaching the lower-level diagnostics and treatments.  Let’s expand the Physician’s Assistant and Nurse Practitioner classifications (a good start), so that more people can provide more health care options (supply) at lower prices.

As someone who has spent large portions of the last eight years attempting to make doctor’s appointments because of a child’s ear infection, going to those appointments, and going to the pharmacy to wait in line for the prescription to be filled, I’m definitely on board with this.