Letting nurse practitioners be independent increases access to health care

There are too many turf wars, government sanctioned monopolies, and rent seekers for anything but that to be the case. There's biases in maintaining the status quo too.

I suppose you could have someone with a pure economics or public health background but in my experience they tend to avoid these topics, in part because they have no incentive to fundamentally change healthcare delivery structures.

Lack of real competition among providers is a real underecognized problem in discussions of healthcare in my opinion. Much could be deregulated in a very beneficial way, but discussions almost always focus on payment instead. When deregulation is raised as an issue, it's almost always done in a way that focuses on easing obstacles to large pharm corps, without addressing other forms of deregulation.

In every case that I'm aware of, increasing scope and practice of providers only has net public health benefits. The only losing group is physicians. It's has always been that way, all the way back to dental practice.