I'd be prepared to call for the AMA not to have a monopoly on their certification and licensing. As it is, we bypass them anyway by importing a bunch of doctors who went to med schools in the Caribbean. Why not run more U.S. med schools instead? At the very least, increase the number of med-school slots in line with population growth; there are now fewer med-school slots per capita than there were in 1980, because the AMA refused to allow any new med schools to open between 1982 and 2001, and has put strict limits on enrollments at existing schools. Throughout the 80s and 90s they justified this with dire predictions of a "glut" of doctors, which of course turned out to be incorrect.

Sounds fair, but that concerns the amount of people licensed, not the requirement to be licensed in the first place.

If you create an AMA2 while maintaining present licensing standards, you're simply moving the ultimate responsibility for guarding the standards from AMA and AMA2 to an entity above them.

Ensuring a baseline ability of doctors doesn't ensure a baseline level of care. It can actually decrease the number of doctors and make it harder for poor people to get care. If you required all car mechanics to go to school for a decade and intern for four years, you'd get some great mechanics. Unfortunately, you'd end up with higher repair costs and more broken cars.

So yes, I'd certainly like to decrease the influence of the medical guild. While the average doctor would be less qualified, the average outcome would most likely be better.

After seeing the quality (or lack) thereof of people who have nonetheless graduated from medical school, I see no point in having any kind of license.

Of course, people who practice medicine should not be allowed to claim that they have a degree from such or such university unless they do (just as food labeled organic has to be organic), but that would be fraud, and we don't need a separate requirement for that.