This week: Welcome to the first newsletter from Physician Associate News!
The internet is saturated with publications, medical journals, and society newsletters focused on medicine — covering every topic from interventional cardiology to healthcare administration. But many of those sites have a distinct physician-angle to their coverage.
The articles and commentary often focus on issues relevant to MDs, DOs, or PhD combos — many times the articles are even written by doctors for doctors. If the information is relevant or important for other medical professionals, such as physician associates for example, it is usual incidental.
But PAs are no longer a small group of healthcare professionals, nor do they deserve to remain an afterthought in the larger medical conversation.
In fact, PAs are becoming a critical part of healthcare teams and institutions all over the country, especially in rural and urban communities. PAs are also becoming crucial members in every medical specialty as well — and gone are the days when doctors dominated the hallways of every subspecialty office.
Now, PAs are key players in delivering healthcare and treating patients across every specialty and field, and they deserve to have the attention and focus from a dedicated publication that matches the best offered to doctors.
This is why we are starting Physician Associate News — to give you and your colleagues a professional news site separate from other medical professions, and independent from your professional organizations (more on that in future editions).
We believe you deserve to get your professional news delivered with you top-of-mind instead of as an afterthought.
We believe it is long overdue for PAs to have an independent news site dedicated to reporting the news about PAs for PAs.
So if you’ve been looking for a place to get your professional news with the doctor slant, then welcome to Physician Associate News. And tell your PA friends, too.
If someone shared this email with you, please consider paying it forward.
Could New Mexico Be The Next State to Join The Compact?
A poignant — and at times very personal — essay in The Santa Fe New Mexican calls for New Mexico to join the PA Licensure Compact. Leah Becker, PA-C, the author of the article, claims the state needs to join The Compact to address the lack of PAs in the state and
What difference does it make: By failing to join The Compact, New Mexico stands to miss out on millions of dollars in federal funding, according to the policy group Think New Mexico.
Did you say millions?!: A $50-billion federal initiative called the Rural Health Transformation Program was created to provide financial support to rural hospitals across the nation. For New Mexico, the program had already allocated millions of dollars to benefit people across the state, but the program has a stipulation: it has to involve PAs in the process.
Say more: Well, when the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) created its scoring methodology to determine how much money to award to each state, it included the AAPA’s state practice environment rating scale.
The addition of that rating scale means states seeking more funding have to modernize laws around PA practice. In other words, they have to join The Compact.
“Please contact your legislators and gubernatorial candidates and tell them to pass the PA compact as soon as possible to increase access to care and to protect our rural hospitals.”
The Handoff: Tim Terranova, The Compact Commission Chair, says The Compact is on schedule and compact privileges will be available to PAs in the participating states some time in early 2027.
In 2026, 8 states — Michigan, Alabama, Arizona, Alaska, Missouri, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and South Dakota — have joined The Compact.
But Terranova said not to expect new states any time soon, since should most state have wrapped up their legislative sessions for the year.
It looks like Becker and New Mexico, and the other 20 states not in The Compact, will have to wait another year.
The US Affordability Crisis Comes for PAs
Affordability, or the lack there of, has started to become an issue for PAs despite their high earning potential, according to a new analysis from Medscape.
Running the numbers: The main issue, the article details, is that the average costs of everything has increased by 2.7%, although everyday staples — like food (+3.1%), housing (+3.2%), and electricity (+6.7%) — have increase by much more.
Even the president and chair of the AAPA, David J. Bunnell, PhD, PA-C, DFAAPA, agreed that PAs are starting to feel the affordability squeeze.
“We see those pressures reflected in the health of the patients and the communities we serve every day,” he told Medscape for the report.
Feeling the pressure: Families with young kids are feeling the crisis more than any other group, which could add to the challenges for many PAs. The AAPA annual salary report found that almost half (48%) of PAs are under the age of 40 — peak timing for many individuals seeking to start and raise a family.
It’s all connected: If rising costs weren’t enough, PAs are also at the center of another affordability crisis: student loans. For new PA graduates, estimates for the average amount of student loan debt ranges from $112,000 to $180,000.
“I see a lot of younger PAs who come out school with a lot of student loans. The current economy just makes it that much harder for them to keep up with the general cost of living and aggressively pay down that debt.”
The Handoff: While average costs are higher, PA salaries seem to be keeping pace. The AAPA annual salary report suggest the average PA salary increased by 4.5% from 2024 to 2025, which is better than nurses (+4%) and doctors (+3%), according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.
In fact, the BLS says PAs have a better financial future than almost every other profession. Maybe that’s why PAs are expected to remain one of the fastest growing professions in the US — at least among the professionals earning $100K a year.
This doesn’t mean you don’t still have to put up with this brand of uniformed nonsense though.
Impersonating a PA? The latest on the wild case of the fake PA from Duke
A social media influencer has been accused of publicly pretending to be a PA student at Duke. Angel Victoria Murdock, who was previously most famous for appearing on the UK-based Netflix reality show “Temptation Island,” was called out for pretending to be a PA student on several social media posts.
One Instagram post about her time as a PA student was reportedly captioned “Today, I get to look back and realize that every late night, every sacrifice, every setback and every prayer was leading me right here.”
Real PA students from the program were the first to call Murdock out on the lie.
Not one for social media gossip?: The story caused enough controversy that Duke’s PA program issued a statement on Murdock’s supposed rouse. The venerated PA institution told the New York Post “no record of a student by the name of Angel Murdock having applied to or attended the Duke Physician Assistant Program.”
But is it a crime?: Murdock has deactivated her accounts, according to several publications. Outside of the online scrutiny, she has not been accused of any legal or criminal wrongdoing yet.
Although, Murdock has also been accused of faking her real estate licenses in Georgia and North Carolina, which might lead to real legal trouble.
The Handoff: For all the hardworking PAs, there’s nothing to see here — go back to your lives (and wait for the 4-part Netflix documentary).
Physician Associates in the News
Fresh off of joining The Compact last month, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has announced a new appointment to the state’s Task Force on Physician’s Assistants. Rania Krayem, DMSc, MEd, MS, RRT, PA-C, will replace Christina J. Hopps, PA-C, who has held the position since 2022. Krayem is the physician assistants’ program director at Lawrence Technological University.
Speaking of, for many PA studies programs, it’s back-to-school season again, including the class of 2028 at one of Canada’s first graduate-level PA program, and the inaugural class of PAs at The University of Montana
We can also add Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences and Baylor University, in Waco, Texas, to the growing list of new PA studies programs, too. As part of this collaboration, Baylor plans to offer a Master of Science in Physician Assistant Studies.
And if you thought PA school was all work and no fun, then you clearly didn’t attend the University of Nevada-Reno’s School of Medicine, which teaches PA students clinical problem-solving skills using medical escape rooms — a rather unique interdisciplinary learning experience, indeed.
PAs are also solving the physicians shortage in Maryland: Like so many communities before them, the good people of Maryland are starting to learn about the benefits of seeing a PA — even though the story mostly talks to nurse practitioners.