ABA Family Legal Guide

Health-Care Law

Regulating Health-Care Professionals

Licensing of Doctors, Nurses, and Hospitals

Why do doctors need a license?

The state legislators believe that by requiring a license for doctors, they can help ensure that you will receive quality medical care. A license means they can make sure that doctors graduated from a medical school that taught them what they need to know to treat you. These laws can prevent you from being cared for by a person who has a criminal history or a character defect. It means that if a doctor does not care for you in medically acceptable ways, the doctor may be disciplined by license revocation or suspension.

A state may use the licensing standards as a way to promote public policy. When the California legislature determined that many doctors knew less about human sexuality than most nondoctors, the California Medical Licensing Board added training in human sexuality as a requirement for licensing.

On the other hand, not everyone favors licensing requirements. Some commentators argue that the licensing requirements discriminate against minorities or raise the price of your medical care. Others argue that licensing requirements were written more than a hundred years ago, and are irrelevant to today's world. They suggest that the requirements impose a stifling conformity on medicine, because all doctors attend strictly regulated medical schools that teach the same classes and do not encourage other ways of thinking about or treating patients.

Once a physician passes a licensing exam, he or she never has to pass another licensing exam or be tested in that state for the rest of his or her life.