A physician licensed in one state is, in the eyes of the next state's medical board, often a stranger. That made sense when medicine was local. It makes far less sense in an era of telehealth, traveling specialists, and patients who cross state lines for care without thinking twice about it.
The result is friction that costs nobody's health and everybody's time. A qualified physician sits idle during a months-long licensure process while patients in a shortage county wait. Multiply that by every credentialing queue in the country.
The Interstate Medical Licensure Compact exists to ease exactly this. Adoption has spread to the large majority of states, which means the holdouts are increasingly conspicuous — and increasingly hard to defend.
PLG's view: licensure portability is not a convenience for physicians, it is access for patients. Care should follow the patient, not the state line. We work on the compact, on telehealth licensure, and on the credentialing reforms that let physicians practice where they're actually needed, rather than where a decades-old map says they may.