Physician assistants and podiatrists.

Assembly Member Berman’s measure frames a focused reconfiguration of California’s healing‑arts oversight by maintaining the regulatory framework for podiatrists and physician assistants through early 2030, while making a set of consequential changes to licensing, supervision, and program oversight. The core change is to extend the operation of the Podiatric Medical Board of California and the Physician Assistant Board to January 1, 2030, rather than letting their current authorizations lapse in 2026, alongside a shift that removes the boards’ authority to regulate physician assistant training programs.

Key mechanisms and details include a series of targeted modifications to licensure and practice management. The bill would raise the maximum number of physician assistants that a physician and surgeon may supervise at any one time to eight, and it would discontinue the existing in‑home health evaluation exception associated with that limit. It would also expand the use of terminology to require consistent labeling of podiatric doctors as doctors of podiatric medicine, with related provisions about professional classification in health‑care settings and insurance reimbursement. Credentialing for podiatrists would no longer include a requirement that applicants pass specified examinations within the past ten years, and the bill would adjust several podiatric licensing fees, including increasing the biennial renewal fee and eliminating certain duplicate or endorsement fees. For physician assistants, the measure would establish a new fee schedule—application, initial license, renewal, delinquency, and related charges—with maximums the board could adjust upward within specified limits, and would move to electronic renewal processes with a legal perjury verification on renewal applications. It would also create a comprehensive review of practice agreement structures for physician assistants, to be conducted in consultation with stakeholders and without imposing additional regulatory duties on the board. The bill would establish a nine‑member Physician Assistant Board, govern its operation through 2030, and add a review mechanism by the Legislature through a new cross‑cutting provision.

In addition to licensing and governance changes, the measure introduces procedural and governance updates. It adds a requirement that renewal applications for physician assistants be submitted electronically, with a perjury certification, and it creates a birthdate renewal framework for PA licenses that includes staggered expiration dates and a pro rata renewal fee schedule, subject to regulatory implementation. Regarding oversight and fiscal context, the bill includes provisions that the Legislature may review and evaluate the boards’ activities and policy directions, and it contains language intended to ensure that a separate policy committee review applies after the sunset. The measure also contains explicit statements about the relationship between the boards and medical practice, including a clarified policy that podiatric doctors should be treated as physicians for purposes of professional classification and reimbursement, and it modifies the framework for board‑issued certificates, disciplinary databases, and related matters in light of the extended sunset. Finally, it includes a provision indicating that the act’s costs to local agencies or school districts are not required to be reimbursed, in line with the act’s funding and fiscal provisions.