Now you&#x27;re talking about changing the current regulatory regime, not about getting rid of it--you&#x27;re talking about diploma mills being able to give M.D. degrees that get recognized by things like state doctor accreditation boards. I agree that would be worse than what we have now, but it&#x27;s hardly an absence of regulation; it&#x27;s just making the regulations stupider than they already are.<p>A true absence of regulation would mean that individual people would have to make their own judgments about who was reliable, in health care and everything else. Sure, anyone could call themselves a &quot;doctor&quot;, but that term would mean nothing by itself; it certainly wouldn&#x27;t confer any special privileges on the person using it. If you wanted to know if a &quot;doctor&quot; was qualfied, you would look at his actual qualifications: where he got his degree, if he has one (and was it a diploma mill or a real school), where did he do his internship and residency, what sorts of cases has he worked on, what is his success rate in treating various conditions, etc. (Many people already look at these things even in our current regulatory regime, as evidenced by the number of websites whose business model is to provide such information.)<p>Would some people make bad decisions in such a regime? Of course. But people make bad decisions now. The question is which regime do you think produces worse decisions: a regime where everyone knows they are individually responsible for making good decisions, not just about what health care to get but about who to get it from, or the regime we have now, where people are encouraged to just accept particular credentials (M.D. degree, &quot;board certified&quot;, on the list of preferred providers for their health insurance) as sufficient and not look any further.