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From: tan@ihlpg.UUCP (Bill Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Credentials, State vs. private
Message-ID: <1258@ihlpg.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 16-Sep-85 18:00:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: ihlpg.1258
Posted: Mon Sep 16 18:00:36 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 17-Sep-85 06:14:55 EDT
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Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
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>	[Me] 
> 	I don't really care in principle whether the government or a
> 	private group does the credentialling itself.  But I want the
> 	government to enforce it ahead of time, not ex post facto when
> 	it may be too late.  Of course, if multiple private groups do
> 	the credentialling, I might notwant to have to become an
> 	authority on WHICH private groups to trust.  So I might want
> 	the government to approve the private credentialling groups.
> [Laura Creighton]
> There are frauds passing themselves off as doctors right now. That there
> are governments does not prevent this. If you like the current doctors,
> all you have to do is only accept AMA accredited doctors. Why do you believe
> that having the government approve the private credentialling groups is
> going to do anything above and beyond only going to AMA registered doctors?
---
1)Granted that governmental policing does not guarantee the absence of frauds.
Governmental policing does not guarantee the absence of murder either, but
we all think government should try.
2)In the absence of governmental credentialling of physicians, a situation
might arise where there were lots of small credentialling organizations, and
no generally recognized large ones.  (The extreme, albeit unlikely, example
of this would be each doctor having his own organization to credential himself.)
Then the consumer's problem of judgeing physicians would be replaced by an
equally difficult one of judgeing credentialling organizations, and
credentialling would become useless.  In such a case, I would want the
government to step in and either do the credentialling itself, or do the
equivalent and credential the credentiallers.
Unlike libertarians, who can always predict the exact consequences of every
libertarian experiment with unerring accuracy, I don't know whether such
a situation would occur in practice in the absence of government credentialling.
I suspect, however, that it is a possibility.
-- 
Bill Tanenbaum - AT&T Bell Labs - Naperville IL  ihnp4!ihlpg!tan