Of note, pas were originally called physician associates, which is where the drive for that name comes from. It is difficult to keep the initials and change the name to something more decriptive of our function in 2015.
I work in outpatient FP and urgent care and my job is indistiguishable from the docs I work with. I don't take the easy cases, I take whatever walks the door be it a complicated medicare patient, chest pain, or just a case of the sniffles. I have my own patient panel and I don't present patient to my sp unless I feel I need to to get a second opinion. I DO ask questions because I am human and dont know everything, but so does the doc i share an office with, somtimes even to me. Assistant is a very, very poor description of my job. It really depends on what field you are in, as a surgical PA does much more what you seem to think a PA does.
As for education, you are a little off. Pa school will cover about 30% of normal 1st year med school, 100% of year 2, and 100% of year 3. We do about 100 weeks of school and md/dos do about 150. We get done in 2ish years because we don't get summers off, and classes run for 8 hours every day.
Does this make our education equal to yours? Obviously not, and a residency accelerates your experiential learning significantly (some pas do residencies, but most do not). I am always in awe of people that can put up with medical education for that long. It is quite an acheivement that an uninitiated person would struggle to understand.
With that said, maybe it is you that needs to look at your ego a bit. Only the the most blindly narcissistic amoung us would claim parity with md education, but we DO peform the same job as you and deserve respect and a title that matches what we really do. There is more danger in patients not treating their diabetes or going to the ed if i tell them to because I am just "some assistant" than there is in a patient thinking I am a doctor, because for all intents and purposes I function as their doctor. I always make my title clear when I walk in the room, and 3/4ths will call me doc anyways, much to my chagrin. They think of their provider as the person "docotoring" them. Then there is the patient who is confused by the title and thinks we are MAs, which actually interfers with patient care significantly, unlike the previous misinterpretation.
In the end, I don't personally care that much about the title. I take good care of my patients and do my best for them. I did not become a PA for the title. Physician associate is not really the best name either, but it is better than our current one, and unfortunately we need to keep the initials. Mid levels are here to stay and will only get more practice rights. If you guys have any wisdom you would be wise to support the advancement of the PA profession, otherwise it will be the NPs that become the dominant mid level and they [organizationally] have no alleigence to md/dos and don't answer to the BOM.