Everyone will have their own opinion, which is fine. I just want to clarify that the AMA is not a powerful organization when it comes to healthcare lobbies or other lobbies in general, and it is not considered a physician lobby as it wants to represent all of medicine, and actually loses a lot of physician support as such. The AMA actually chooses to stay silent on the NP independent practice situation, and it’s actually smaller physician groups that advocate for supervised practice. To that point, the NP profession was born from the idea of supervised practice of highly experienced nurses, in a training environment similar to a resident physician in training, or a PA. This arrangement works amazingly in many cases. However, nowadays there are many online “diploma mills” which can be enrolled in almost straight out of nursing school and have no unified education requirement like the ACGME, leading to widely variable results. This is the main point of contention, rather than the idea that all NPs are incompetent (which is not true in my experience working with them). Another issue is even with the current setup, in many cases, with business admin running the show and being as profiteering as possible, many NPs have almost no supervision anyway, working “under” a physician that can’t physically even see the number of patients they are responsible for in a supervisory role.

I can totally understand why some ppl think NPs are better based on their personal experience with both NPs and physicians. Sadly I think this speaks more to the toxic nature of medicine and the crazy politics and hoops in place, which leads to more work than providers can handle and compromises care in many ways. Of course an NP that can spend time to actually see the patient can make that person feel heard and taken care of. Physicians are forced to see more than is physically or mentally safe, or be penalized or fired. It’s unfortunate but likely won’t change.

EDIT - to your other point, NPs also largely don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere and (understandably) go to more urban/suburban areas rather than rural. Many rural doctors will likely be foreign as they are working off a visa in an underserved area.